Roadmaps for the Soul

In reviewing my trove (not necessarily all treasure) of writings, I found this one, which is not nearly one of my favorites. It's called "Roadmaps for the Soul." I wrote it over a period of more than a year, regularly excising some part and splicing in a new thing I'd written as scrap. Finally, I felt somewhat satisfied, with this mangled, hopefully-caustic, and sadly pessimistic poem, whose inspiration came from listening to the rough edges of 60s rock and roll and the tall tales of anarchy in late 70s punk.

I'm on the front porch
Brandishing a blowtorch
So don't come near me
If you don't want to get scorched

I said, watch out, you
Be careful what you do
You can try hard
But get marred
And more likely get scarred
If you carry a gun
You’ll get put in a police car
So be on the lookout
And don’t do cookouts
Oh, they’ll get you even if you just pull a book out
‘Cause that’s what being a crook’s about

Then up the pavement
I see door-to-door salesmen
If only my dog
Went after them like the mailman

I said, don’t give in
Keep on living
You got cursed
But you come through the worst
So don’t die of thirst
And before you get revenge
There’s more you got to do first
Jump through the loopholes
When you get your soup cold
And as always, make everything you do bold
‘Cause opinions change almost every new poll

I need to get the president
Out of the basement
Maybe he can talk to them
And get them to make sense

I said, truth don’t change
People just get strange
You got new clothes
And a new nose
Even a set of brand-new toes
But your mind’s still ablaze
What you didn’t get was a fire hose
So bluff with scorn
At all the newborns
Say all the wasted words that prove to warn
That if you want to make it, you got to toot your own horn

Oh, what are they selling?
Well, they ain’t telling
I calmly say I’m not buying
But still they keep on yelling

The etheriform wins the bet

Where am I? Who am I? I feel so acutely this evening, the blood that runs in my veins. Tonight is the kind of night I rush to feel something worth holding in my arms. I am tender and selfish.

The sky is full of squalor, silvery-white clouds passing by in columns and vague shapes my memory tries to recall; the pale sky stars are, I know, merely the long-traveled beams of far-away explosions, novas and supernovas in hot gas vapor blizzards. Elsewhere I look up and see only the same dark I see when I sleep, only there here seems some color, some life-blood to inspire a splendorous awe. What that God must have made this! And for whom? Am I to see all this? It's too great for me.

And in the rage, the tide turns inward on itself

I don't know how to write about myself. You should probably ignore the pretty symbols and metaphors I use and just concentrate on the underlying confusion that haunts every post, in obscure passages and as a sentiment expressed throughout.

When I left Florida in mid-August, amid a flurry of byes and ill-expressed well-wishes, I had a few things in mind, some goals to accomplish. Korea was, is, and will forever have been a necessary step, far-removed though I am now from the familiarity of all that was, well, familiar. But I don't want to recount here the purposes of coming to Korea. I could spend hours on that topic, and only begin to exhaust its insatiable reservoirs of discontented feelings. In any case, those thoughts are better said in a poem:

A trough in the outboard waters
seekers drifting without their daughters
cars collide in the aftermath
careening through and around the path
like songbirds sweetly, swiftly moving
glanced upon by sun reproving
outwards all our sights are bent
inwards to our discontent

That poem, like so much of my writing, is unfinished. And indeed, that is the theme of my life at this moment: that I am not finished. I won't say unfinished, for perhaps my manuscript has already been written; but it is not completed to my satisfaction, and in my voyage to Korea, and in the subsequent days here, I am renewing the alterations, I am changing the substance of my character into something unrecognizable.

This week was miserable. My students were frustrating to no end, and it grieved me to punish some of them so severely. I had little humor to indulge, even to my prized Minnie, who, despite her frequent errors, tries harder to than anyone else in the class, a fact for which I am indebted to her. The glare in my eyes was harsh and unceasing all week, exacerbated by a renewed struggle with a sore throat (damn kids, with their pathology-spreading fingers).

All this, and I no longer can tell myself in a mirror. This is frightening to me, to be so far gone that introspection seems futile. I am not unhappy, but the origin of what I do feel remains a mystery. And when I know, I feel that will crash the levees finally.

Soft thoughts

The light outside has waned to an inestimable smallness, and I would readily go blindly into the darkness. Risk dominates my life and thoughts. The world only turns in fragments and farces; somehow it forgets its past and continues, blood-drenched.

More so than ever, there is nothing worth the relation. Everything here is as normal, and small, and full of gaudy guys and girls. I am deciding upon which plane I shall exist, in my mind or my body, unguarded or fully reveling. My vision is decidedly gray and unchanging, and all seems welcome and free. My writing is always concerned with the truth hiding under the nature of things, yet I am not unambiguous myself. If the world is a wondrous prostitute, so it is. And if I have endeavored to endure my years as a sundog, so be it.

But my worldview grows daily in its purview, and in ways not always deemed to be better. I am so unapologetic and flatteringly grave that I should shut up and not convey any more than I have. In fact, this is how my journal entries read: if you leafed its pages and dog-eared its contents, you would be most disappointed at the lack of clarity. But I understand every word.

Why do I evade? This is the question on my mind. Why do I seek to be un-understood? I don't want you to know me too well, but -- dammit, I want you to try. I want myself to be worth the effort. And I twist and boil myself beneath a fading facade that deigns to be alive and allowed to do what it pleases. Thoughts of God and women fruitfully chase me, and I flee after them. I scatter myself like ashes, but the substance of my fire is untouched.

And it ends with the comforting notion that perhaps it's okay, even as it is; that while seeing the world from the sun is rather dark, I do like its point of view.

Coils

Where you live
and where you pray
is where you will die

and where you go
is where you try
and where you grow
is where you smell and hold with me, upon your wavering wines

Or is it just you're such a lovely place to wait outside
and soon the living's so dangerous that you won't give it a try
then I watch my belly
float through the halls about which there are frays
and the river runs through a paradise and lends its cheer once again

When you grow
start up a size
and when you go
I want a slice to remember me apart from this world I belong
now come with me, watch our cover resolve

One day I will turn the corner and won't be ready for it

There was a time when the free flow of my thoughts looked rather graceful and flitting, but it feels bureaucratic now. In every corner I find little to relay, but nonetheless I am happy to be here. If I can, I want to make this blog mirror, in words, the sound I hear in my head. It is glorious, like monks chanting, as an organ runs like liquid and an accordion lopes in and out of the mix. I hear incantations, and fervor spills out like gold into a cast.

The background of this blog is from a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist who died in 1988. I am a big fan of his drawings and have been since I first discovered them a couple years ago. His art has influenced my thinking, and I would credit his art for creating in me the desire to view the tumult as somehow beauteous.

Plans seem far away again. I am in Korea, where I will remain for at least another ten months. My life at the moment is like that of a man who, having placed his hand to his forehead, cocks back his neck to catch an ephemeral glimpse at the yellow sun. For risk or reward, I am looking, and I see a light distorting strangely. Yet like all things, it will evanesce one day, and turn wan as the moon.

I have to say, though, that I like it here, that it excites me and surprises me still. When I wake up tomorrow morning, I will head off to see a sweet cabal of children who are like the finger cymbals in the symphony of my life. They will scream and chant and laugh themselves into being, and through them I will vicariously attempt to prove, if only to myself, that maturity can be just as weird as growing up.