The past week has been feeling the strain of the growing season. I’ve done poetry performances 3 times in the past week, and I’m tired. Gratified. Challenged. Poetry plays the part of Himalayan Blackberries right now.  Invades my life with it’s fleshy thorns, takes root in the space I need for other pursuits, yet produces such tasty and abundant fruit.

I ventured down to Portland this past weekend, booked a bed in the Hostel on 18th and Glisan. Celebrated a friend’s birthday with that which is uplifting and thought provoking. I think the highlights were in the conversations I had around town, the affirmation that I am learning something in the way of subcellular biology and mycological trivia that I can share with those I cross paths with despite the fact I feel under accomplished. Perspective is valuable.

Also, I ventured into the Chinese Garden, I was told how poetry is one of the most revered arts for the Chinese scholars of past. Each part of the garden pays careful attention to symbolism and aesthetics, and it acts as quite a bit of a portal for shifting the mind about. (Thanks to The Lost Art of Hitchhiking, I was inspired to visit.)

plum blossoms on cracked ice

I am at a tired time, where feelings are getting dredged up from the depths, and my poetry is finally feeling welcomed into the world. It’s been chilly with transient sun before now, and there is still time before spring arrives. I’ve felt as if my veins were pumping poison, and perhaps as if I were inhaling ether or Carbon Dioxide (which was only the reality of Thursday’s benzoic acid synthesis). I simply am finally acknowledging the fact I’ve run into another sinus infection, and now it is time to pull inwards and heal myself with rest.

A turn of phase in the Japanese language which is often likened to the English saying “water under the bridge”. On the surface, these two phrases may seem similar, they talk of the same subject, Water.  ”Water under the bridge”, however, implies that perhaps you are standing over a body of water. You are observing from a higher vantage point something that is a (likely) comfortable distance from getting you wet.

“mizu ni nagasu” is dramatically different. There are many ways in which water could physically manifest itself here, it is not confined to one locality…perhaps you are setting something out to drift on a strong current, or you are using the word water as a euphemism for tears. Perhaps you are using water to clean.

What are your thoughts?

I refer you to Kristen Allen Zito, Open up.

I have been fever dreaming the past few nights of being airborne, dreaming of forgetting what few tricks I’ve learned on fabrics. Dreaming a trip to Mexico, dia de los muertos mourning with trapeze and sleuthing a week of locked away memory. On the waking side of life I have a fear of losing my strength. So when the sun circled into my life this morning with it’s fiery orb, and my musical friend rolled into town from the South I knew it was time to gratify the impulse once again.

The height between concrete and the top of my fabric is roughly 14 feet from the ground. The weather is just warm enough to be bare footed and not frozen. And as I am reveling in this moment, there is music traveling through the air of this corridor which has been co-opted as a studio. Those who are not armed with an instrument or standing behind SLR cameras unassumingly are simply trying to encode or extract a memory that is a bit out of their ordinary experience.

I feel favored by fortune as I begin to remember all that which I have forgotten.

The sunlight, the song, the dance.

My photos, in dim light are impressionist era paintings. Bodies climbing, falling, dancing under the low light. These images don’t seem to transfer to large lenses and bizarre aperture values. Years ago, when I had moved to Western Washington for the first time, I put away my fancy camera and forgot how to use it. “The rain,” I thought, “would surely destroy the electronics.” As a compromise, I promised to learn to write in a manner more vivid than any photo I could capture. The reaches of my attention were to be expanded so that I may fully appreciate a moment above one static image. I’ve moved many miles about this country since then.  I can’t say weather or not that promise has held true.

After learning more today about cloning, the applications of embryonic stem cells, the potential use of mushrooms for synthesizing important pharmaceuticals, how wood growing fungi snare nematode worms to consume their Nitrogen… after contemplating the remarkable chemical reactions that humans catalyze just by chewing on a piece of broccoli, hell, even just by living. I went out to behold the world for the evening. Three events later…

-tense shift-

The sound of my patella popping as I push into my bicycle petals is unnerving only for an instant. Two clicks and I’m alright. I’m supposed to be healing, but where is the “use it or lose it” line drawn? I could do one whole pull up today, an improvement upon one week or so ago. Water is falling from the sky, kissing my thighs, soaking into my coat. I feel a rain droplet hit my lip, the bridge of my nose, my left cheek. My dress flaps about in the 3AM air that I rush by, a feeling of utter content with the rain.

You would’t even hear a ghost whisper along the main street of this town. All that is left over at this hour is my Breath, a Bicycle chain whirring, my Spider mind pulling strands of the day together.

Closing in on my living quarters, the sound of rain bouncing off of carports is an amplified reverberation. Water flowing into the drainage proves an underground river. I circle and circle around the parking lot until utterly dizzy and then zoom on past my home to admire the lake, the rain, the night.

It’s at the end of an evening, a small poetry reading. I tell him  that I will share five minutes, but not give them.

He leads me out the front door of the house and around to the side car port where my bicycle sits waiting silently.

“Listen…”

Rain bounces off the roof, the trees speak as ice bursts off their weighed down branches. “This is Poetry,” he says. Would you like to go further? I nod. He takes my hand and leads me into the snow covered field.

I have barely spoken a word, trying to stand with the beauty of the moment, but also attempting to assess motives. Mist holds court as trees stand sentinel. The rain is catching in my hair, on my coat.

Still holding my hand, he narrates, “This is Poetry without Ego. This is nature present, and calm. Listen…All of this breaking and crashing, the land is experiencing so much pain right now, but it continues to speak…The trees, look at them, so firmly grounded yet they reach for the sky…And you, you shared your poetry and I can see you are so brilliant. Yet you have so much fear in you…” His voice sounds of the theater.

I think of how these ideas of nature are affirmations I immersed myself in years ago.

I think of how I almost cracked up earlier in the evening as a mutual aquaintance cued up Such Great Heights on the stereo while He and I stared into each other’s eyes talking. The line goes “I’m thinking it’s a sign, the freckles in our eyes are mirror images…” He said something along the lines of “You need to trust others while still knowing that they can not be trusted.”

And I’m still piecing together a jigsaw when he finds a knot the size of a tennis ball nestled in the blade of my shoulder simply by pulling me in for a hug. Mind you, I have a winter coat on. “I think my five minutes are up. Are you ready to go back?”

This, I may not have found noteworthy to blog about by itself, but alas, my professor found time to share with the class some memes which have root in the history of the 40′s and relevancy to today’s latest news on copyright law. Imagine, all this while setting us up for laboratory practice in molecular biology!

The above video is a scene from Downfall, a 2004 film, which I probably have never seen. In the memes which my professor shared, the subtitles are amusingly rewritten with relevancy to class content. Watching the original, however, took me back to high school. I was in a class called “Facing History and Ourselves” a year long survey of the Holocaust. We watched numerous films full of Nazi propaganda, and annalyzed them, read books such as Night andInto That Darkness, and integrated current events into our curriculum to examine the phenomenon of “bystanderism”, the act of standing aside and allowing an event which we oppose to occur while we watch.

It’s Funnyhow these neurons fire together, isn’t it?

I hit shuffle on my music box as I run out the door and on comes this song, which I don’t quite ever recall loading. It reminds me of a cross country meet in High School, maybe upstate New York, maybe not, perhaps in the winter, but I want to think it was hot. So long ago, that the I have to use my narrative licence to make things up. We, a team of girls in our red track suits run with a Boom Box to cheer on the male track team blasting their chosen song as they run by in sweaty packs “Pour Some Sugar on Me” wails away. But back to here and now. I’m jazzed happy, on some kind of high. To be under this blue prism sky, sticking my tongue out at the children creeping home from school as I run by, watching them crack up. Then, the catch, somewhere around 12 minutes my knee starts speaking in a voice that’s all sorts of sharp.

I nearly limp home, but I stop at the play ground to do some pull ups. Hanging on the bar, I reach for pull ups that never come because all the muscles from my arms have somehow been eaten away by cloned canine olfactory receptor genes and sketchy human-e. coli hybrids that live in the labs I’ve learned from in the past three months or so. I settle for some core engagement instead.

In my life I don’t recall one time where I could not physically manage to perform one pull up (could do 8+ in multiple sets only a few months ago) but mark this, I have met that day, and do not intend to live in it.

As I glide through the parking lot onto the street I revel in the feel of my sore thighs, overworked abs, and aching shoulders. This is the proof that today I worked towards the closest thing I know to flight. The vertical climb of fabrics, horizontal occupation of the trapeze, and the rough hold of the rope were all embraced. Just so, the breeze on my face is proof that I am traveling through space much faster than I could ever walk.

I wonder about the year ahead of me, all of the possible futures, standing silently by the urgency of now.

The drill of the Dentist grinds against my teeth as I watch the freshly pulverized bone spiral up into the overhead light. Water streams down my left cheek, and I’m trying my best not to freak out too much as the good dentist works his way through a lively play list whistling a bar of “rock lobster,” mumbling a few lines of “Shorty Got Low Low low Low…” and finally jumping into full fledged song as “I’m too sexy” begins to play.

I consider the fact that If I were in some other context these karaoke sessions may almost be enjoyable. Hell If I weren’t in the middle of gagging on my own blood & inhaling the dust of what was formerly my teeth, I would probably start belting out the songs as well. Alas, that is not the case, what I am stuck doing is a series of isolatteral exercises so that I don’t freak the fuck out and punch someone who I assume is trying to help me out.

As my upper jaw was quite numb I contemplated the neuronal inhibiting magic of localized anesthetic injections, without which I might prefer to slowly let a tooth rot and fall out over facing the momentary pain of a dental drill. As soon as this stuff is injected pain ceases to exist, the only thing withstanding being the detection of significant pressure. I give a silent thank you for this and also consider the funny idea of trust. How does a person decide that it is OK to trust anyone with a couple of papers on their wall that say they did alright in training, a stock pile of anesthetics, and an interesting taste in music.

I think of all the times my older sister assisted in removal of my baby teeth.

I think of a white bearded old man I met at the Epic Cafe in Tucson who suggested I do all my own dental work and go find a pet raven…

II. Ready for the Floor (play this)

III. I am sitting at a restaurant with two strangers I met moments before. To my right is a wall. To my left, a massive woman dressed in black. She is carefully put together with her short dark hair & pale skin painted over by foundation. Bubbling up from her soul is a full blown rant spiced by the salt of her margarita.

Across from me is a tall lanky man, shaved head in a beige trench coat as the evening wears on he dares to interject approvals and interpretations of her gospel.

“You are so timid,” she says, ” There’s a lot of fear in you…but you’re brave too. When you walk away I want you to take something with you. I want you to understand that tomorrow, when you wake up, you can choose to do whatever you want. Do you understand that? You can choose to do whatever you want.  This is really important…Every morning you start with a blank slate.”

They pick up the tab.

We part ways.