The Sidewinder Sleeps This Night

I spend most of my time trying to make things feel meaningful, probably like most people. I've planted vegetables in pots that I'm keeping on the front porch, and some evenings, when I have time to breathe, I sit on the porch swing and listen to the same bird who sits on the neighbor's rain gutter and calls for his mate. When she comes, she brings the sunset. I keep remembering, though, that I'll be in Madison this summer. Who will water my plants?

It often seems like life is a series of mis-steps that never lead anywhere. We are dancing with the mountains and the rivers and the winds that blow. And we barely even notice. I don't know that anything will ever stay besides the sense that nothing stays, not even the Earth's rotation around the sun. Not even our sun.

And this afternoon, between rushing from one thing to the next, I felt something. I looked up at the sky, bubbling with storm clouds that only drizzled water, rumbling with the sun slowly falling down the blue. It felt like the world was a massive lens, seeing through me, and I was only a speck of dust in that great eye. But then I felt my feet, and my footing, and the knowing that I had to be someplace. So I moved on.

I got home today and had some quiet. Then I made some noise. Remembering that, though everything falls apart, the temporary-ness is what makes words, phrases, voices, people, places, and lives.



















"This here is the place I will be staying.
There isn't a number. you can call the pay phone.
Let it ring a long, long, long, long time.
If I don't pick up, hang up, call back, let it ring some more.
If I don't pick up, pick up... the sidewinder sleeps, sleeps, sleeps in a coil

Call me when you try to wake her up. call me when you try to wake her."
R.E.M. - The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight


Listening to Automatic for the People makes me feel solid.

Am I Blue? Yep.

My uncle Mike died this morning from terminal cancer.

The Collapse of the Universe

When I was a child, lost
and numbed by holiday gatherings,
aunt agnes on the comfy couch, shouting,
I sought you out.

In the context of an arid field, my love
for you would be seeds and rain,
yo the unperturbed soil, grain
for grain mysterious and unknown.
your jokes a weightless break, a mist,
shattered the shadowy nighttime world
of my mother's family, gathered.

Gathering clouds threatened.
A car crash. A war. A brother without
a sense of stopping. Not my troubles, but
your own. A history I never knew.

You, an uncle, a friend. I wanted
to be like when I was smaller, my own
field yet wont to bloom, unable to know
itself without rooting through someone else.
And now, later in the seasons, the Earth
having turned its face away and
back again, my own life a mirror formed
of sand, always changing, ever fading.

A phone call and an email later. You
are gone. Clumsy words and clumsy letters. The dance
of grieving, of sowing seeds. We mourn
for ourselves because the land is gone.

And I am a farmer, by blood not
by right. My rough hands counting seeds and raindrop
flights. One for sorrow. Two for joy. Three
for you and me. Uncle and nephew,
the lost and the waiting to become, and
all the soil we've ever tasted, ever wasted
is stardust. We and all of the brilliant things
originally formed in the center of stars are
long division, slowly decaying into memory
and other intangible particles. Bits, bones, teeth,
and sinews, pearls and fingers and seeds, all these grains
we've been and come to be, even soil subdivides.

Standing in the kitchen of my grandma's house, watching
silently and waiting to be someone larger, someone
smarter, you looked me in the eye, you looked
and saw me as I was. A seedling rooted in the air.

repost from 2006: A WHOA OH OH

I said hello to no one's there






























"Hello"

web of lies: a temporary post

i feel like that guy in films...
the one that is friendly and talented, but somehow is unable to be fully there, unable to fully connect with the people or places around him
the awesome in absentia, who shows promise, potential to be cool, but who remains outside of his own life...alienated and alienating

(Stuff was here; now it is not)

i do wonder that so much of social interaction is an empty dance through weekend evenings, where secrets are revealed, gossip exchanged, opinions parried about. that so few really think about or reflect on these dances, so few contemplate the steps as they're made. much less realize the consequences. much less recognize the dancers, the people standing or sitting all around us. the broken beauty of almost-being ourselves. i wonder that we humans spend so much time pretending to be not-fragile when we are incredibly delicate. that harsh words can cut so deep. that i haven't learned yet when to hold myself in. and when to let go.

I cannot let go.



I'm a liar; I let you in.