Connected to the Past

I tend to view the past with a sort of disdain for the ills that human history has inflicted upon the world. Exploitation being first and foremost on this list, followed by horrible amounts of death and destruction... but I've realized, in fact, that I have need to connect with history. To feel a sense of collective meaning that extends beyond knowing things, but feeling. There are impactful moments that continue to resonate with me.

1) Each time I listen to Gregorian chant albums I feel drawn back into a time-line that pulls me into my European ancestry. I feel the pull of the music against the stone walls and against the cathedral halls. I feel the weight of the religious words swirling around me, and I feel their holiness and their questioning somberness in an unexplainable world. Kyrie, eleison! Lord, have mercy on us.

2) Walking around in the city center of Braşov in the heart of Transylvania I felt the age of the buildings take over me as the scene took me in. The Biserica Neagră (Black Church) dominates the cityscape and you get drawn in by its simultaneous timelessness and deep, aged majesty. I did not wish to leave Braşov and I could have spent all day, and many days in the awed presence of that building with over 600 years of history surrounding it.




I have more connections to make, and I am being pulled so strongly back across the Atlantic with all of my being. Nothing is coincidental about this. No, this pull comes from the most logical and emotional aspects of my being. A return to my ancestors' homeland is in my future...

Meeting You in the Elephant's Song

I met an elephant on the moon
he was tall and elegant
like a British attendant
in an expensive perfume parlor

moving with simple grace
while swinging his trunk
across the white moon dust
creating a fantastical haze

he told me he was ancient
and measured days in revolutions
cast around the earth
in elastic sighs and wails

tilting his head back
he raised his old trunk
trumpeting a sad song
thick with sinews and steam

a heavy wind blasted forth
with an odd Saharan breath
and a Mediterranean mist
impounding a crater oasis

the deluge was your skin
rippling under the water
pressing gentle waves
across the moonscape

with a sudden deep breath
water rushed toward me
covering my pressing legs
as I swam up toward you

your breasts piercing the plane
rose and fell with riptides
swelling up from below
I was pulled toward you

as I reached your shore
drenched in glowing moon water
warm with timeless creation
I slid in to embracing arms

and then I knew the meaning
of the elephant's sad song
echoing forth from my being
with our unified breaths --

it was not really sad at all
but tender with the touch
that carries gentle weariness
of our intimate vulnerability

we all must live with the urgency
of being the last of our kind
roaming the surface of the moon
with the grace of our delicate fragility

Poetic Fragments Mingled in the Night's Hushed Breath

Are difficult times of life
shaded of a certain color
to make the present glow
in stupefying contrast?

Eyes of the ocean;
I, of the sea,
Halcyon hymnals
Beckon to me -

Please, touch the back of my neck
and run your fingers through my hair.

I want to feel protected and fragile
like the innermost Russian doll.

I want to feel dazzled and virile
as a sudden tempestuous squall.

Draw me into you
like a moon's orbit
toward the horizon
of a stilled expanse,

a clear reflection
in unending luminosity
breathes the night
awake at its apex.

Eyes of the ocean,
I, of the sea,
Deep incantations
Reckoning me -

Anew on planes of creation
built upon the joists of night
a canticle by candlelight
upon a full flickering flame.

Your breath upon mine
heavy as the sky
twined in harmony
embodied in time,

pressed together
in celestial gravity
an archetypal body,
an old Mariner's Rhyme.

We are our own poetry.

Eyes of the ocean,
I, of the sea,
Maritime chorales
Echo infinity.

Four Moments of Reflection on Practical Creation through Imagination

1. brief meditation upon your skirt

an exquisite Austrian skirt
purchased from a second hand store
cascades like wind currents

it dances on its own
a whirling dervish
slowed by the earth's gravity
pulsating gently from the floor

everything in existence is meditating
and I am the meditation

I am learning a new kind of balance:
patient urgency


2. remembering Johannes the Seducer

Kierkegaard broke his engagement
to Regine Olsen by pretending

he entered brothels creating
an image of infidelity
to break her heart

that was the easy way

then he wrote Either/Or
featuring a seducer's diary

how similar they are
machinating their lives

Johannes pretended he cared
enough to keep himself interested
and flocked to the next woman
before his first seduction completed

pretending is unimaginative
because it is cheap

I understand you, Soren,
and don't think I don't see
you wrote from a place guilt


3. whereupon we create together

I have played the part
given to me to its end

true imagination is constructive
building beyond its bounds
in seismic ripples from your skirt
dropping fresh succulent apples

the script of my life has ended
and I need a new authorship

I have learned that William Blake
often took his wife to his backyard
where they were the founders of humankind
living the myth of the Garden of Eden

naked for all to see:
remember - shame came after
the Tree of Knowledge

he understood the need
connecting all of his being
to the divine moment of creation

I will pick your apples
from the ground
and eat them


4. a hommage

Piter Piter, snowy night,
In the city's wondrous sight;
What song beckons from thy chest,
Carry words we may ingest?

Flitted flurries come and go,
Winter's melody bestow;
Your hands, mine, across the sea
Connect electronically.

Where the Dreamers Dream

how many times have I watched
you speak to me in silence?

when half the world sleeps
and dreams are marbled busts
assembled on territorial borderlands
directed notably inward

the masters of culture perched
with prominent beards and chins

we are the dreams of dreamers
undecipherable words dance along
transatlantic currents deftly
caressing one day's night

one night's day
I fell into your eyes
and the ocean dived in
to rescue me

owls watched with a subdued eye
while you dried me off
with a Mediterranean breeze
thick with Aeneas's mythological memory

it was trumpeted from Ganesha's trunk
hinting of spice-filled melodies
he was worn upon your back carefully
interstitial space filling his fingers

I heard him well

the melody warmed my skin
and I harmonized with my breath

the owls took flight
and grew into condors
blotting the sun away
with bellowing hoots

in the growing shadow
I entered a vixen's den
searching for a bright moon
to reawaken the day

she gave me bright pink paint
and pointed me to the origin of dreams

from the afterglow of your eyes
a path offered me forth
along the border inroads
and a mischievous smirk met me

finding a confused bust of Karl Marx
unsure of which direction to face
the pink paint quickly covered
his skeptical bearded visage

suddenly I saw everything clearly
in its lucid illuminating shock
you grabbed me with hands wildly pink
and we ran playfully in stride

and in that moment I heard with supple clarity:
the danger of imagination
is in its truth

but the night was ours

Time Travel is the Mine Field of Existential Freedom

NO FATE BUT WHAT YOU MAKE

These famous words from Terminator 2 ring in my ears tonight. Sarah Connor carved the words "No Fate" into a picnic table before deciding to destroy Skynet before its paradoxical growth to power can lead toward the nuclear annihilation of humanity and the subsequent enslavement of mankind. You see, the robots came from the future and the technology left in the past was the technology used to destroy them.

How do you fight against the future when you know what the future will be?



This is the metaphor for our existence. We aren't fighting against the future coming back to destroy us; we're fighting to exist in a world filled with infinite choices and no ultimate authority to make decisions for us. This is the sort of situation that Sartre describes as being your own God. This is not a point of arrogance or some sort of usurpation, this is a description of having to choose for yourself.

Freedom, then, is an awareness of this responsibility of being able to choose. "Freedom" is revered as a sort of holy thing here in the United States, but I fear that many people don't understand it. I see many bumper stickers tell me that "freedom isn't free," which is correct... but for the wrong reasons. Most people that have these stickers talk about the sacrifice of the military and the use of force abroad to support freedom. This is not why "freedom isn't free" - it isn't free because of the responsibility one has toward freedom.



I watched Manderlay last night. It is a film about a small community in the South that ignored the end of slavery and continued to have slaves grow cotton into the 1930s. Grace, the protagonist, arrived with her father into this community and decided to forcibly end slavery with her father's mobsters. She refused to allow the unjust share-cropping system to replace slavery which was effectively in place in other places in the South at this time in history. Instead, she gave the slaves the legal power over the plantation.

As the story progressed, the effort of changing the social dynamic of the plantation proved impossible. The oppressed kept their oppressed mentality, and the more power given them, the more confused and uncomfortable the situation became. Finally, in a terrible moment, everything collapsed. Grace was asked unanimously by the freed slaves to run the plantation again as their owner. She learned shortly after this request that the slaves had previously chosen to renunciate their freedom for the security of a simple, structured life. Please become our beneficent dictator.

By God. Horrifying. Choosing slavery. Grace wanted out of there immediately. She, who had "freed" the slaves was now imprisoned by the situation she created. Wilhelm, the old slave who advised her through this process kept saying "we're not ready."



We're not ready. Understand that this is the key to everything. We're not ready. Who is ready for freedom? Truly. Freedom isn't free. A large portion of the population votes for authoritarian leaders because authoritarian leaders provide security. And many use religion to provide security from the unknown. Thinking and change make people feel insecure.

Here's the problem: many people aren't up to their freedom. And too many others are more than willing to dictate what others should do with their freedom for them. This is a problem as old as time. The social contract theorists took this problem on. Hobbes noted the need for the consent of the public by suggesting a mandatory pledge of allegiance toward a unitary king. Locke took on these ideas, agreed that consent was needed, but liked the representative democratic approach. Machiavelli wrote two books about government. His book about democracy stated that democracy was the best form of government, but it required an engaged, informed citizenry to use their civic virtue to make it work. His other, and notably more famous book, talked about the inevitable need for a beneficent dictator in the absence of a working democracy. These philosophers following Hobbes realized that people needed to rise up to responsibly govern themselves, and all had their doubts that people could effectively do that.

Power is a strange thing. Those who are oppressed have power over those who oppress them. George Orwell realized this when he had to deal with a rampaging elephant while stationed in Burma under British rule. He knew that the elephant did not need to be shot, but did it anyway because he felt the pressure of expectation from the crowd of the Burmese. Power dynamics make the oppressed and the oppressors act their roles, it is a psychological reality. Milgram's shock experiment demonstrated that people were willing to shock someone to death if someone with authority told them to even if they didn't want to. The United States has power of China because they've lent too much money to us. Christian non-profit groups that help in Africa need poor orphans to help to stay in business. Power and powerlessness become an identity - a role to live up to. But so much of it is generated artificially.

There is no solution to those who want an authoritarian safety net. There is no solution to those who want to be an authoritarian safety net. These people exist and the rest of us have to learn how to exist with them.

Clearly, it would be better if we embraced the paradoxical truth of time travel stories: choice is the central and only value in life. The abdication of choice, and the willingness to accept that abdication from a position of power are two paths that lead down the same road of self-nullification. The truly most remarkable people in history are those who pushed the boundaries are forced people out of their comfort zones from whichever side of power they resided in. Thoreau's letter from prison, Gandhi's march to the ocean to make salt, Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on... poverty (yes, poverty... not what you were expecting), Cindy Sheehan's vigil to ask Bush what cause her son died for, Tank Man in Tienanmen Square... and on and on and on. People's boundaries must be pushed, and it will never be enough... but we must never replace injustice with injustice. Manderlay makes this very clear, but historically we need look no further than the fallout of the Belgians leaving Rwanda and the genocide of the Tutsis that followed.

We need to ask more of everyone, and it may never be enough.

A sense of awe and wonderment.

And the question of how to get everything I want...

My life has that sprinkling of magic again that I've sorely needed for so long. And the material is mostly immaterial except in the case of proximity.

Strange how little things like getting flipped off by a Native American in a random unexpected moment can be transformed into something life affirming and spectacular.

Life Doesn't Happen to You

For all of the negative things that I am dealing with now, I've had what many people have said is a surprisingly good attitude. In the last several years of my life, I have come to realize that everything truly is an opportunity. The end of a relationship is an opportunity for you to face yourself, your patterns, and resentments. The death of a loved one is an opportunity to honor that relationship and continue the legacy of that person's life with your own. The loss of a job in an opportunity to forge a new future and push toward new opportunties, and seeking new opportunities where you didn't know there were opportunities before. The loss of income and even possessions like a house is an opportuntity to change your lifestyle, to humble yourself, and seek help from others.

Jean Paul-Sartre talked about how every situation offers choice which allows for the full expression of free will. He said this was limitless and gave the example of being in a concentrate camp to prove his point... even if you had no way of avoiding getting into the camp, once there you can react in a wide variety of ways, internally and externally. He lived through that, and it certainly made him stronger... for myself, I wish never to endure that kind of human suffering.

Regardless of what I wish will or won't happen to me, my lack of control does not mean that life just happens to me. I am understanding now more than ever with my attitude that life is what you make of it. And there are so many opportunities, in fact, maybe more found in adversity than outside of it.

the world is contracting
and we're all getting a little closer

waterwheels wear hats made out of hay
spun by robot warrior samurai machines

it all sounds faintly familiar
like an old fairy tale

perverted by sexual tension
and industrial revolutions

Tiger Woods's penis is in the news again
riding a chariot to Oedipal destruction

even if I had my own marketing department
I'm pretty sure that just one woman

would be enough

if her arms and legs
weren't battery operated

Reflections on Losing a Dear Friend One Year Ago

Exactly one year ago someone special to me lost her life. I put words last year to the process of death, and the details of the service which affected me in ways I was unprepared for. I did not put words to why this woman was special to me, because that was harder than narrating what was happening in the moment.

In my small boarding school, I typically had 5-10 students in my classes. This student finished her time with me differently than most. First, she's the only student to get into her e-mail in my class to make secret plans to have someone pick her up in the middle of the night. She was rebellious, and I can respect rebelliousness if it comes from a place of individualism (even if it isn't thought out well). She was caught, and I made fun of her dearly for that.

She ended up needing just a couple specifics credits in her last term, so she found ways to expend all of her extra time in my class, I believe maybe three of four out of the five blocks in the day she was in my room. I was her favorite teacher. She'd get fired up about politics, and use her time researching where she'd live, photography, creating a budget, and generally was quite responsible. She was easy to talk to, and listened to me with a careful ear and asked insightful questions about my feelings and life. By the time she left I realized that I liked her a lot more than I thought I would when I first talked to her. We were to keep in touch and I'd share my music and movie suggestions with her, because she liked my taste and we had some things in common.

She graduated, and exchanged a couple messages online, and then I hadn't heard from her in about a year. Then, in the most random night, I showed up to a Flogging Molly concert with my (now ex) girlfriend and her friend who drove to the show from quite a distance to see this band she loved, and was basically was the reason my girlfriend and I were at this show. Personally, I never had listened to much Flogging Molly. It was fun music, but not something to listen to on CDs... something to listen to live and jump around to.

I showed up to this concert after a concert of my own. I performed in a concert band several hours prior to this, so I was stuck in my white performance shirt (untucked, no bow-tie), black slacks and socks, and felt rather uncomfortable and unlike myself. I put a sweatshirt on over this ensemble, but it quickly became too hot for that and my performance shirt, so by the end I was a sweaty mess holding a few shirts in a dashing v-neck white undershirt. As I'm in that haze of the moment, after a song I look over and hear "Hi Will" and see her. I am speechless. She says her name. I say "I know" and then she explains that she moved to this town. We talked after the show and I met her boyfriend. Older than her, quiet but confident looking guy, but in typical clothing for this kind of affair. We got each others' contact numbers and left.

It was what happened after that moment that really set this woman apart from all other students I've had. She made a point to actually use that number and talk to me and invite me to any event she thought I'd be interested in. We met and had coffee several times and talked about life in a very serious and deep way, but also joked around. She came back to the school for a couple days, and spent almost the entire time with me and sat in on nearly all of my class. She had grown up, and she demonstrated with her actions a new dedication to her life and a seriousness about making the most of it. She was working, she had a nice apartment, she was organized, she had plans for herself.

On those several days at the campus, my student turned from being my student to one of my closest friends. It was easy and ancient like when you see an old friend after a long time and feel like you haven't skipped a beat. And she challenged me, she wouldn't take my bullshit answers to questions about things that were difficult, she pressed me which is something that so many people find difficult to do. She challenged me, but she was graceful and non-judgemental and the care in her demeanor proved it was from a place of caring.

Not so long after this, the difficulties I had with my girlfriend finally led to us breaking up after living together for three years and spending the significant portion of the two years prior seeing a lot of each other on weekends and extended breaks in school or work. It was traumatizing, but again this former student was the first to offer her support. She invited me over to dinner. We hung out for a whole evening with another wonderful former student and watched a movie and hung out with her boyfriend and his group of friends. At the end of the night, we had a deep serious talk at her little dining room table while everyone else watched the end of a favorite horror movie. It was one of those talks that stay with you, that are unforgettable like an anchor in your life. I was lifted out of the depression of ending a relationship and getting stuck with a house that I didn't want and could barely afford to keep on my own, while my ex-girlfriend skipped away with no responsibility and over half of my savings as a parting gift. I realized that night that I was loved and had a community stronger than my pain. I realized I had a friend that was eternal, that I could see hanging out with like any old friend - at any point in my life when the time allowed for it. Who cares about the house - this is the stuff that matters.

We talked a few more times on the phone, and made plans to hang out again on a phone call that took place in the first week of December to meet the next week or two. She didn't make it to the next week or two. She died in a horrible wreck with her boyfriend on the way back home late at night.

There hasn't been a week since then that I haven't thought of her. I've kept her card from her service close at hand and see it every morning when I start my day. Without really having dealt with a death like this before, it was really difficult for me. As the last year moved on, I realized that I hadn't really lost her... that what she'd given me would last forever. I miss her quite a bit, and writing this now brings tears to my eyes, but she showed me a true deep friendship and the value that my teaching could have. I am changed forever.

Thank you for everything. I continue to love you and promise that the lessons from our friendship will make my life better as a tribute to you and what you've done for me. I hope to model the compassion and love that you've modelled for me. I give my endless gratitude for having been blessed to know you.

snow fell tonight - it would

I watched movies with my parents
until late in the evening
as my dog slept on my chest

I escaped into the easy world of romance
where love emerges from disdain
in small packaged moments of tension

I settled into a warm blanket
grasping my laptop absently
checking scores from around the county

maybe someone will log on
and tell me in a panicked moment
that they always have loved me
and they're sorry for everything

it will surprise me and make me cry
and it will be exceptionally sad
when I respond despondently, "oh"

because I simply can't believe it


I know who I am
and love fits into a box
tailored by knights and magicians

it feels old like a classic novel
wrapped into celephane Disney World

and the grit of my memories
chafe against celluloid dreams

I sit on the other side of the screen
watching and taking notes

I am the Dues Ex Machina
and I wield a pen

or as tonight - a laptop
propped above a small dog
oblivious to the work it takes
to resist the pulls of tethers
endearing me to feel sadness
when the main characters finally kiss
in a predictable candid moment

I am the machinations
around which things happen

Living with grace may be an impossible task if you associate yourself with people who lack it. I'm trying...