Little Poem Press has published one of my poems in This So-Called Life. Edited by C. E. Laine and Kathy Kubick, it is a collection of the best of the TSCL writer’s group. I am honored to have been included. You can read some of my poetry at the VirusHead main site.
Daydreaming – Standing in line. Waiting for that download. Sitting in traffic. Ignoring the commercials. At such cerebrally relaxed moments, fertile imaginations may wander into worlds separated from this by a gentle nudge or a violent shove. Daydreaming is a human predaliction, as natural as speech. Our daydreams are formed from threads spun in our hearts and patches of life knitted by our life experiences.
When your imagination begins to knit, what quilt unfolds? Of what do you typically daydream?
I have always been very imaginative, somewhat inward and private about some things. Daydreaming is part of the way I process my inner life, my poetry, my spirituality – a form of exploration for hopes and fears – a playground for free thoughts and visualizations – a way of finding connections and comparisions between unlike trains of thought.
I don’t really have one major theme in my daydreams. They are all over the place most of the time. The one exception is when I am emotionally upset or disturbed about a particular situation or event. In that case, I often replay a scene or imagine a new scene in which I stage events and conversations and act out possible interpretations and scenarios. I do this too when I am trying to make ethical judgments. It’s a way of hearing different voices and perspectives play out their roles. It is very liberating to me because in those imagined scenarios I can allow conversations to take place that would probably never happen otherwise.
Like many others (I’m sure) I have romantic and erotic daydreams. I daydream images before I get that bit of inspiration or cluster of ideas that is the spine of a poem. I daydream conversations with God and the gods, with the dead, with those I no longer see, with those I have never seen. I used to daydream about conversing with philosophers – Kierkegaard in particular. I daydream about the fae in the back woods, about the life under my feet, about the words of trees to one another.
I daydream about political change. I daydream my son’s future. Occasionally I daydream horrible situations and imagine my responses – or what would be the best thing to do if such and such happened.
Sometimes I catch myself daydreaming about strange things: a snake has bitten my leg and I am all alone, a community of friends has suddenly rejected me, I am utterly and inexplicably cold and cruel, waves on the ocean have configured themselves into intricate shapes and impossibly tall sculptures.
I daydream that I can interpret the winds, that I am invisible.
Daydreaming is central to my sense of self and to my work, to my emotional balance and to my understanding. It grounds me in the world and lifts me above it. Whether I discover myself daydreaming already and explore it further, or whether I enter into a dreamlike state more or less intentionally and consciously – daydreaming is a private realm that no-one else can ever take away and I value it. I have always thought that those who denigrate daydreaming must have very limited inner lives.
Who was your god talking to
when he created in “our image”?
Why is the name writ plural from the start?
You say that there is only one god,
One god and there is no other.
The commandment merely states
you must worship no other god –
not before god YHWH.
And this manifestation was given to those
who did magic on top of the mountains.
You say that you’re a monotheist
but you believe in Jupiter-Mars
with Osirus for dessert.
Do we worship i-am first
(or with top-level speed),
and then move on to his children,
his cousins, his friends, and his lovers?
Where at this time is Apollo?
Where are the bodies of the fractal gods,
And what have you done to my mother?
Never mind for now the ring around
the rose of the incorporated chart,
we’ll circle here and all fall down
around the father son and ghost,
but what I want to know is
all about God’s angels.
Not human souls, but avengers,
messengers and spies, with
lofty principalities now forgotten.
Who was inquisitor golden?
Who was the writer of the secret scrolls?
Who let loose all the plagues and the pests?
Who was director of intelligence?
Tell all about strange seraphim
and cherabim,
and cyberabim unfurled,
One so frightening says “do not fear”
ethereal insemination
(this star-mare is slave hand-maiden),
but others pass for men, speaking
to women, who shelter them
until the walls come down again.
We read them as benevolent
— these shiny bureaucrats —
who embody only functions,
the shapes of thought that bring us plagues
and war and death, destruction.
The director, this vengeful warrior
needs to grow up, and stop punishing you
for failing to meet his impossible goals.
Your god makes you schizo
with constant double messages.
Really – isn’t he just a mirror
Of your own pathologies?
Your savior resurrects you one day
as a zombie to frighten away
your nonexistent children of the future.
From sheol, from hades, the liminal worlds
you retain the lake of fire,
the hell you create in your own world
rides faster than a blue-turbaned fool
on a donkey. You believe that your sins
will all tumble away if you only
have faith and forgive,
but your faith resides more
with the rapists and killers
You sheeple hold on to your fears.
Who among you believes
this old news of a kingdom is good?
You’re willing to bring on apocalypse now
trusting lord to clean up for the steward?
You seem only to be able to define
goodness as membership
in your meaningless community,
formed and bounded by
collective hatred of any outsider,
and especially the outsider within.
Wasn’t that Lucifer’s mistake?
Your devil remade in red horns and tail
for fear and conversion and control.
Who does your devil look like now?
He, always he, longs for wild days as Pan.
Pipes playing, hooves dancing,
and wine you’ve turned into
the blood of the innocent again.
You lack the compassion to
even feel awkward, while sucking it
down for your network connection.
Like you, your sa-tan, the liar, the adversary
was part of the system, he took
time out from walking about, to manipulate
your god to Job’s torture.
And when prophets arise as they usually do
to challenge and ask for account,
the right sinks in might and devious masks
and power thus speaks on to truth.
You would kill your messiah again yet today
between terror and patriot acts,
You would never even know what it cost you.
Unmoved and unbought by the greediest leaven
then no-one will ever select you.
If they can’t implicate you in circular games,
they can always just make you look guilty.
I have no doubt that Jesus would think
our passal of leaders were jerks,
but here is what will surprise you:
He would not look upon you
as anything more than the
same old usury-changers,
squat in temple’s dark corners
while God’s God looks on
and this “big” God looks on you and through you.
Remember ‘fore signing your name to the scroll,
your choices are what will create you.
“Repent” simply means take a hard look inside,
take a chance to turn back around now
It’s still not too late, but the longer it takes
the more will die from your blindness.
If you would be of faithful and loving and kind
Wake up now before you lose the moment
More bloodguilt continues to deepen the stain
Your own hands will never release you.
(Major revision of “Christianity Rant,” written June 3, 2004)
I have just spent an hour -in the morning!- dancing around the room and singing at the top of my lungs. Deviating from my normal high-volume lineup (Tori Amos, Godspell, Kate Bush, etc), I went to Real Player and Yahoo Radio and cranked up the volume on Green Day. I can now do a passable “Holiday” and “America Idiot.” I am so energized! I’m ready to run, to hit, to punch, to scream. Liberation!
Hear the dogs howling out of key
To a hymn called “Faith and Misery” (Hey)
And bleed the company lost the war today…Hear the drum pounding out of time
Another protester has crossed the line
To find the money’s on the other side
Can I get another Amen (Amen)
There’s a flag wrapped around a score of men (Hey)
A gag
A plastic bag on a monument
I BEG TO DIFFER FROM THE HOLLOW LIES
This is the dawning of the rest of our lives
Don’t want a nation under the new mania
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?….
The subliminal mindf*** America.Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alien-nation….I’m not part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia….Information age of hysteria.
It’s calling out to idiot America….
Can you picture it? I mean, I’ve got it DOWN. I’m at back-row-of-the-theater full VOICE. And I’m jumping up and down and getting a stitch in my side because I am way too old to be doing this.
Anybody know any other terrific critical political music? I knew of Green Day, but really only had listened to what played on the radio – (Good Riddance-Time of Your Life). When they were on SNL the other night, I was struck by the performances. I was affected at so many different levels.
Music isn’t really as important or meaningful to me now as it once was, but once in a while something really hits me. The last one was Eminem “Mosh.” Before that, probably Ani DeFranco, “Self-Evident.” There were a few little criticisms in Tori Amos’ “The Beekeeper” – only really a line or two in songs like “General Joy” and “Mother Revolution.” I’ve seen the video for “Amerika the Brutal” by Six Feet Under, but that’s a little too harsh for everyday – I save that one for serious depressive moods! There’s another “Amerika” song, I think by Rammstein or something like that – the video is great, but again, not really music I can get into.
I would like to see a lot more music. Music can do and say more than argument at this point.
Writers, composers, musicians – get to it please! You’ve done it before, do it again!
Graphic by VirusHead using AP photo.
Saturday mornings are a special time for me. I remember a song from my childhood called “On Saturday Morning.” It’s a time of coffee, relaxation, maybe some NPR on in the background. I have always loved Saturday mornings.
This one started badly. My night had been full of nightmares. I had a dream in which water was pouring in through all the windows of a very strange room, and when I got up from my bed to investigate, I found that the inside sheets as well as my body were completely covered with tiny biting crickets. A formal dinner was being held downstairs, and they were eating a torn up and still bloody horse. The faces, morphing and shifting, concentrated for a microsecond on me like a collective intelligence. When I attempted to leave the house, the walls started glowing and pulsating – I woke up in a sweat.
And in pain. The two-year-old remnant of poison ivy on my foot was throbbing again, a raw place that magically reappears from time to time. My back was on fire where I had been clawing it in my sleep. I pulled a muscle group on the upper left side of my back a few days ago, and that was aching. When I sat up in bed, it seemed as though every bone in my back cracked and moaned.
My son has the croup, his doctor thinks, although it is possible that the foot-mouth-whatever disease that’s erupted in his preschool might have hit him. My hubby is in a black mood – between treatments, he is vulnerable to infection. The first thing I do is go around disinfecting the doorknobs.
Normally we hug and kiss and cuddle on a Saturday morning -this morning it’s just curt good mornings all around. I give Ben a dose of cough suppressant and children’s motrin. Then I finally get my cup of coffee and head outside to the deck to have my morning “wake-up time” alone. I am deep into my new Peter Straub book – Shadowland – when nature calls. I wrench and limp and hobble inside, do what has to be done, and return.
Finally, I relax. It is a beautiful day. The sun has come out, it’s in the 70’s. Because of the rain last night many more leaves have fallen, and although it’s nothing like a (beloved) New England fall day, it is very pretty. I take a few deep breaths and enjoy the view for a moment.
My coffee is almost done. I’m thinking that I have successfully adjusted my outlook and attitude as I take the last sip.
Looking into the cup, I see a green fly, drowned.