Last salvo

Sometimes
Two hours past midnight
I wonder
Wandering
Clutching shreds of text
Tinkering with tattered machines
Compounded and combined
Strewn 'cross the plain of time
Something from Dali's mind
The desperate efforts of whispering madmen
Fleeting forms
The artist and poet
With song and poem
Rusting skeletons with silver plate
Chisel-chipping hieroglyphs in river stone
Thinking twigs forever losing leaves.
A melting of chaos made by angels falling
The hurler and the hurled
The world below,
A pool that is boiling.

We are a raging fever of little cells
Kept in quarantine
It has stretched to hold our minds.

Delusion of the latest hour
Where lettered pages little avail
All books fade and finally fail.
They are but the fuel and foundation
A funeral pyre to warm the incoming generation.
Tomorrow comes quickly.
New cities grow
Bridges are built
And tigers still shred antelope on the plain.

My thoughts are dust
Words are simply shapes.

The Sun shines on me and I like it.

There is no excuse. We must take on the world.

Build! Build! Carve out great swaths boldly!
The warmth on my face is free. Who can imagine the immensity or beauty of the sky. At any time, those of us who are free may walk beneath it.

There is no excuse. All prevarication must be denied.

If no one else had ever dared to break free of the cave to cartwheel in the open air, then we could rationalize an argument. But too many have escaped. We can see the smoke of their morning fires on the horizon, and we can smell their cooking meat.

We must engage. We must seek out our targets.

No limits.

[the other day, I was trying to describe Thomas Wolfe's work. i am reading "O' Lost!", the unabridged version of "Look Homeward Angel". I was trying to say that you could not "read" Thomas Wolfe because his writing is too rich- you have to "eat" it so to speak, but not like food, more like eating a landscape. Of course, that just sounded crazy- I was trying to say that Wolfe's thoughts are too big to objectify- they have an organic life of their own, and coupled with an immensity of scope, grouping them with the usual clever novel just doesn't work. So here is a metaphorical/poetical attempt to explain my understanding ( : ]



I do not read Thomas Wolfe.
I cannot.
His words are too large.
Textual landscapes
Verdant sentences thick with woven roots.
The chapters loom like organic monoliths
Each inch carved with a biography that records a minute history
Intricate weave
Documenting the progression of synchronistic artifacts
Each breeze
Every thunderstorm
An accounting of each knot and gnarl,
The random scars and deliberate marks
Inscribed, noted and em-poemed in stone.


The splendor of his vision
Gossamer connected arches
Shining nouns and singular verbs with buttresses of adjectives
Conceptual cathedrals ink-hewn
Midnight mortar 
A loom of pencil and pen.


I cannot read Thomas Wolfe.
His work is larger than I am- 
The tyranny of reader and work
Subject and object is overturned:
For Wolfe there is no seventh day.
You cannot close the book 
You cannot stop creation
To play God would be obscene.
The potter becomes the vessel
The vessel becomes a tower and swallows the moon.


Wolfe creates worlds with life
They live and breathe, have form and breadth and exist in space.
Like immense vistas
Continents 
Solar systems with gravity.
He paints pictures that tremble with a pulse:
The sweeping shores and wide waters
The misted islands of Puget Sound
Rich with trees
The smell of moist earth mixed with old leaves
The rough solidity of granite in the sun
Residue of snow on the mountain
Soft sand with a hint of heat.
His man walks
Has meat in his voice
A button is missing on a sleeve
There are wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.


No, you must eat his words
Digest them.
Dig holes in the hills and valleys of his books
Excavate into the loam of his thoughts
And like a heavy cake, eat slow bites.
Dip into the waters
The warm shallows
The translucent mean where silver trout gleam
Into the deep cold where darkness is a current
Sip them
Drink them down
Savor like a connoisseur.


Wolfe carved his Michelangelo's and bound them into books
A universe un-contained by any beach of sand.
Explorers and wanderers walk his shores
Waves wash their feet
The sun is reverent while the land sings. 

Sharpening my verbal fangs

I am being tortured right now. The Individual Concept of Support is the capstone event of my Captain's Career Course, and I am trying not to crash and burn. A concept of support is an English guy's worst nightmare. It is a synchronized compilation of all the logistic considerations supporting a military operation. Massive amounts of math, time-rate-distance, straight line computations between multiple points. Rigorous, strict and disciplined thinking.

Ugh.

So, I took particular and uncharacteristic pleasure in taking my daughter to the doctor during this exercise. While there I did some reading in a great book, The Transitive Vampire. It is a book difficult to define, and since I have only read 15 pages of it, impossible for me to review. I will say that from what I have read so far, it is fascinating.The writer unleashes a maelstrom of a vocabulary composed of articulate witticisms that are uniquely expressed. I believe the purpose of the book is pursuit of grammar for the pure joy of reveling in the dance of words, but with a poetic creation of free-wheeling sentences for the hell of sheer fun. If I am ever an English professor, this book will be on the reading list. There is definite innuendo dancing and a gothic influence to the work- as if the Addams family collaborated on a English Grammar book for their future generation of eclectic misfits. Here is a brief sample:

A compound predicate, or compund verb, is the happy issue of two or more verbs that are joined by and, or, or nor and that belong to the same subject:

The recluse groveled before the mannequin and

kissed the hem of her slip.

She wriggled in acknowledgement or writhed in

uncalled-for shame.

The debutante squatted and pondered her

meaningless life.

The werewolf howled piteously and sought

comfort in the lap of his wife.

His huge, calm, intelligent hands swerved

through the preliminaries and wrestled with

her confusion of lace.

It neither soothed the unrecorded regrets nor

averted the impending doom.

Simply too much fun, buy it from Amazon.com today:

The Transitive Vampire

Deliciously evil- a grammatical delicacy akin to verbal frog-legs.