Mayflower to Sin City

The Las Vegas lightening was invigorating

much more so than the blippityblingblang

drone of monetary ignorance

and the glare of throbbing neons

through a rainspewn windshield.

Monday morning in Vegas

was so far from my imagining...

somewhere in the distance of the

International Airport

is a single slotmachine

dinging away, and figures with

empty pockets strewn about the floor,

snoring, awaiting

flights back to 9-5 and billcollectors,

debts and the pump of heels on concrete,

pushing rayon skirts beyond the

just-above-the-knee mark.

In the casino a headache crowded my skull,

as if so many of those hoping to make it big were in there, crooning

win the big bling, the faraway glimpse

of millions and millions and forget

all you owe, because this, baby,

is a tabula rasa palimpsest.

Thunder and rain, lightening

and the flame of a distant fire burning

in a home I don't have keep me awake

and clear my aching brain of

indirection and a pain

I can't quite put my foot down on

to stomp out the want of something

I know I don't deserve at this turn

of tides in a desert of vice

and romping indecision.

Like those pilgrims

nearly 400 years ago

who first set foot on that Rock

to face a near future

of starvation and strife with HEATHENS,

this life is studded with the dreams

we don't quite know how to pursue

because we have yet to stumble upon

the resources or the aide of some

abiding alibi, sometimes love.

The heathen strangers like us

who are not along for the promise

of god's chosen this-and-that riprap

of give and give and take even more

gluttonously,

we we will somehow prevail

the loss of a diligence in favor

of a remote-controlled digified hifi

rancor in order to simplify.

We we will scale down to the bare threads

of that which will force us to breathe

in deeply the follies of our ingenuity.

all we must do

is to

realize

that

each

breath

we

take

is our own.

tremors

something runs through my nerves like

mexican jumping beans trailing

long spindles of silk.

At the end of the line,

a slight wallowing, a hollow

yearning for stillness and movement

and novel remedies to an ancient disease;

we were once locked in attics for

these unfounded shakings in a structure

once sturdy.

but who am i to question

the intuitive motions a body endures?

like an unfurling scroll of testament

to perennial adaptation,

the desiderata of my sensorium

will once again go placidly amid

sham, drudgery, and broken dreams.

still, when the drums roll

for change, for future dates merging,

or even for a thing as small as

the loss of a chair with a familiar view,

a constriction wells up

under sternum and scrapes at

the core of my complacency.

A scooping away of stagnant

yet addictive comforts.

And this is good.

Make way for the unknown

pockets of lucid sentience

down my rare-trodden lanes of

vicissitude!

Love Revised

As skies flourish with the waxing storm on waning moon, a sweet languor rises in my chest, warms the gullet bereft of hot breath in the presence of you. These poems are graspings at May footsteps in trodden grass, commitments to change in a lunar sense: the burgeoning and sloughing off of tentative silences. What holds you to what you see of me are those graspings alone. I like to find pleasures not found at once, but hidden within something of another nature. Like icicles dusted with sugary new powder, or the smooth sharp spruce needle budding from resinous sap, we, too, belied our design-- or merely sought to be synergy incarnate.

Split Wood, not Atoms

give me a maul of decisiveness and a splittin’ round of sage foundation, and i will change my swing on things. i will wedge into my conscience: temperance like a green log, unseasoned for burning, hesitant— but with the pull of the freeze, splits, separates, sacrifices itself; the hollow sound of fullness, sonorous in wood under the sway of ice (frosty siren of night and clarity?) and a glimpse of the scarlet horizon; the swooping arc of an axe midair— the threat of precision and plea of narrow aversion; ffwa-chunk! connection, but no division and lift axe locked in log, and schwunk! silence as two promises of warmth breach and fly from one; the devotion of simplicity imbued in sweat

The Smell of Sex

Yesterday thought of nothing but

sloshing mouths, grasping limbs & clutching hands,

flavor of repression released,

and palms sliding down a back moist

with the dew of transpiration-- finally.

Through the mundane day's events

the musk of the coupling--

sweet and cloyingly ancient

like ocean air charged with the harmless weight of thunder

or just the breath of the stars themselves--

wafted around the corners of

doubt & loss,

toward a moment

one moment

dispersed into a zillion soft-edged

planets perfumed in the night's cologne.

I wondered whether others

identified the aroma pervading my periphery,

infused in my hair,

clinging to fingers that touch today

with constant glances

back on a moment

one moment

the distillation of a zillion soft-edged

planets whose synergy bathes my body

in light.

Us as Arcs

So what we are is how we were (where is becomes was) when was meant now… when every it, be, do stops (tenderly, mindlessly) it’s only for these bodies woven, these quivers (like ripples: expansive) of bundles of nerves recharged and calmed. a word is a string of shapes that, evanescent, is sent up once spoken in a rapid and harmless line. but a doing clings and slithers, terribly parallel to the earth. perpendicular straight lines only meet where they began: words and doings divorce and estrange. love and fear and sin are sounds of shapes of what cannot exist until the words are forgotten, and these bodies bend down and take handfuls of dirt.

Polychlorinated Biphenyls: An Apology

“pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease:” -ee cummings 

The old poison might as well be genocide: 
travels with no itinerary, is blown and sucked 
from downtown to uptown to out-of-town 
by industrial fans in flourescent factories, 
the whoosh and halt of afterwork traffic, 
a vacuum of emptiness that exists in quiet places. 

It twiddles thumbs beside us in subway cars, 
drifts into the cab we hail, darts in the door behind us 
to mingle with aromas of dinner and candles and home. 
We create and curse
 the air we embrace in ChicagoSt.PaulSanFranL.A.SeattlePortlandTorontoSaltLakeAlberquerquePhoeni x 
And spacial boundaries implode. 

Arctic wind nips slanted cheekbones.
Icefloes crack and split from jagged shore.
Up and out here, where Polar Bear’s paws pummel seal, 
yellow claws gliding through flesh as spoon through soft-boiled egg, 
tradition rules with a generous hand. 

Ulu meets muktuk, slices tissue fat with warmth. 
Chew for hours, swallow. Stokes the fire within. Melts the insistent shiver. 
And inside, where mother stokes the home fire 
and proffers her breasts like satchels of sunshine, 
the infant is frightfully small at eight months. 
Cannot intuit the nipple. 
Puckering air. 
Wailing frustration. 

Forgive us. 

Forgive us for the missing generation 
of Polar Bear mothers who did not den 
because they could not den— 
half of their reproductive organs male. 

Forgive us for the strained development of your young: 
killing memory and thyroids with our lust 
for the progress that winds up regressing. 
Forgive us for spiking your life blood, 
your Manna, with our exponential pretentions. 
We know not what we do. 

(But we know now that Arctic rural mammals’ milk 
is poisoned with seven times as much PCBs 
as their urban industrial sisters.) 

And now we know that although the old poison still follows us home 
and clings to our suits and highlighted pinned-up hair, 
mostly it settles in the sea, as most things eventually do. 

So plankton to fish to whales and seals… We know now. 

But how can you come to believe 
the fire within kindles 
hormonal imbalance and stunted growth? 

The children adhere eyes 
to the box with a view of the world, 
while the elements weep in bereavement: 

which world wins? 

The assimilated never judge 
and the judges can’t rule the tides as lethargic, 
but the children abandon generous tradition 
to eat sugar in plastic wrappers, 
travel in fast-moving fiberglass, 
create and curse the air they embrace in ChicagoSt.PaulSanFranL.A.SeattlePortlandTorontoSaltLakeAlberquerquePhoeni x 
and I still haven’t figured out 

where we empty the vacuum once we fill it..

on the subject of remorse

some time down the fragmented thick line of tomorrows and mornings, you have to believe that the you you were is somehow a seed of the you you are, even if the enigma of your past drunken blunderings and torn love-lorn poetry (eventually as crumpled as crusty panties) fails to sequin itself on the hem of the evening gown of your fastfading youth. So at some indefinite and blurry point, all those selfish sips of a center which could have been no other than love will purge themselves in the name of conclusion. The regurgitation will only gleam, slippery and reeking of regret, puddled at your feet like maggots on carrion, but it will not peel itself off the barren soil which you have paved with your indulgences. That cast-off you once called love will not grow lanky legs to stomp all over your future with flappy old shoes-- not unless you let it. you could see the maggots for what they are (a little ecology only hurts the loners): decomposers of the substance left over when all the meaning has been sucked out of inspiration. The maggots thrive on the emptiness you should strive to contain.

Poems from the MySpace Vault!

So in 2009, my computer crashed and I lost everything I have ever digitally written... or so I thought! It turned out it WAS a good thing that MySpace wouldn't let me delete my profile, because lo & behold! some old poetry!!! Some of this stuff is pretty good, I must believe. I'll start with the oldest first. This, by the way, is in lieu of preface.

migratory beasts of barter

I'm constantly torn between surrounding myself with livestock and being able to experience living in other regions of Alaska. As far back as college, I harbored the dream of tending a small herd of alpacas, spinning, and weaving. But I also love to flit around the state (and the world at times), dragging my mutt around or finding a dogsitter easily enough. I guess the event of my son's birth changed a lot in my mind as far as traveling goes. When he was 8 months old, we took him on an excursion traipsing along the Balkan coast of Eastern Europe, and the actual moving, traveling part of the trip made me realize that bopping around the world with a kiddo just doesn't really appeal to me much. The airports, the train stations, the hostels, the weariness of it all left me drained and too exhausted to appreciate the subtle cultural epiphanies I usually travel in order to glimpse. Perhaps it was merely because our itinerary was too structured for toddler-travel; it'll be a while until I try to prove that point right or wrong.

Also coinciding with my son's birth, or more probably because of it, was a sharp turn in toward the more frugal, home-making, self-sufficient aspects of my lifestyle. Whereas before the pregnancy, I found little time to act upon all the tenets to living the deliberate life of which I dreamed (I'll admit it, I basically lived on a barstool and conjured up homesteading dreams through whisky-soaked laziness), suddenly lonely with my belly bulging and not a fairweather friend to be found, I finally experimented with all the ideas I'd filed away in recipe books and folders of patterns. I began nesting. And although I reminded myself for a while there that there would indeed come a time when I wouldn't be nursing, and Bo would be sleeping comfortably through the night with Dada, and I could in theory resume my barroom tendencies and relationships, that far-off promise gradually lost its poignancy. We're on the homestretch to weaning now, and I find that I have very little desire to clamber up onto a barstool, precipitously tipsy or not, mostly because I've lost interest in the camaraderie and conversation there. Sigh. I'm just not as much fun anymore. My dream of traveling Alaska's taverns and writing/photographing a coffee table book on Alaskan Bars & Bells: barroom tales and traditions, is losing motivation for research.

So I'm finding my aspirations of self-sufficiency waxing. I'm putting more energy into preserving, cultivating, improving soils, expanding garden area, keeping chickens, and making room for goats in the workshed. I even took a tour of a yak ranch in Copper Center and toyed with the idea of clearing an alder patch on the hillside to raise a few. Enamored with the idea of receiving the gifts of milk, meat, fiber, packing, and land-clearing from one animal, I've narrowed my decision on goat breeds to Cashmere and Nigora, possibly a Nubian. My summertime neighbor has a spinning wheel she's talking about selling (why couldn't I try it out for the winter?), and the demand for eggs and raw milk is high. An especially viable endeavor in Seldovia, where we really are a one horse town. One horse, no goats or cows or yaks to be found.

So I've decided to hunker down for a while and make a farm of this 40 acres of west-sloping temperate rainforest. Slowly, albeit. I bought my first chicks this spring: a nice lil mixed flock of Orpingtons, Mille Fleur D'uccles, Black Copper Marans, and the obligatory Rhode Island Red, Barred Plymouth, and Aracauna. They took over what was once the goat shed, a remnant of a friend of my Dad's gag gifts of two wethered dairy goats from years back. Connected to the goat-shed-come-chicken-coop is a workshed with a woodstove that I plan on converting to the new goat house. The chicken run will be expanded to include the creek and enough elbow room for a couple of goats until I can consolidate my garden into one area and get fencing up around it. Then the goats can range on pasture, when I'll set up a few paddocks through which to rotate them during the summer.

These exciting plans, however, haven't snuffed the flickering flame burning in my heart to try living in different Alaskan locales. One day out in the skiff running our setnet sites in between picking fish, I daydreamed up a plan to have the best of both worlds. Why wouldn't it be possible, I wondered, to have a small farm that you could pack up and relocate seasonally? If we limited our menagerie to two goats and six chickens, a guard dog and a son, theoretically we could convert a cab-over truck camper to the animal palace and live in a bus or motorhome ourselves. We could strap some fence panels to the roof of the bus, and set up our nomadic farm in any community in Alaska reachable by road or ferry. We could barter milk and eggs, along with some salmon we'd put up in the summer and other harvests from the sea and garden.

By the time my feet hit the dock again on the return from a day's fishing, I had dreamed up a new lifestyle. We could be nomadic traders in the fall and winter, and return home again in the spring to start the garden, prepare the nets for fishing, hatch out some chicken eggs, and freshen a doe. We'd fish june and july, put up various harvests in august and september, and head out again in the fall to do it all over again. Nomadic domesticity.

So I've yet to get my goats, but in September, whence I return from the states, I'll be picking up Belta and her doeling from White Fireweed Farms in Fairbanks. Belta is a F1 Nigora with cashmere-like fiber, and her doeling is a heavy nigora, meaning 3/4 angora 1/4 nigerian dwarf, with angora-like fiber. Hopefully Belta will be bred, and in late January or February, she'll freshen and soon we'll have milk!!! Am I ready for this? I do believe I am.

I've also been perusing craigslist for converted buses and motorhomes. We had a pretty good fishing season, and I'd like to aim at purchasing a porta-home and further fixing it up to be ready to live in next summer at fish camp. Then the plan is to pack up and relocate in October to Fairbanks for a month or two, then on to Haines for the rest of the winter.

Well, it's time to take some action on furthering these dreams, so I'm out to reconfigure the fencing to accommodate more animals!

my first rambling stutter of a post

I started this blog initially to push myself to write more. But then I wondered why I felt like I needed to plaster it across the internet, and it seemed flauntingly trite, so I posted a few short pieces and quickly forgot about it. I have a recurring dilemma with the occupation of writing and why I do it and who I intend to read it and whether and why I feel it is important for others to read it.

But that's aside my new intentions. I realized today just how much information I have gleaned from other people's blogs. From my early eager endeavors at wholistic mothering, to preserving foods, to raising animals, to crafting, I have perused other's lives at will as they have presented themselves in their own tidy blogospheres, searching for answers to my questions and testimonies to backup my inklings. How valuable it is to have thousands, millions, of experiences typed up, to be found at the simple tap of my fingertips!!! I live in a very small community, so accessing diversified personal experiences the old-fashioned conversationalist way doesn't produce as many results locally. And I've found myself clinging closer to home anyways, as I've learned sometimes it's just easier on my disposition than carting my increasingly defiant toddler around with me on social outings. So, I don't get out much any more and my computer has proven to be a surprisingly affective catalyst at reaching out and trying new exciting methods and means of deepening my desire to live deliberately.

All that said, I came to believe that I'd be somewhat of a hypocrite of my own philosophies if I didn't contribute my own knowledge, experiments, and ponderings. A post on my blog just might inspire, guide, confirm, or change one individual's cravings or determinations. So in the spirit of karma, or just plain old boring responsibility, I embark on a meaningful sailing through the blogosphere.

Indulgence

Pammy was drawn to those claw-grabber stuffed animal vending machines while she was pregnant with Ramona. She was so exceptionally good at maneuvering those metal fingers with the joystick, by the time Ramona arrived in her cotton-candy nursery she had the company of hundreds of Pammy's plush prizes. Pammy was also an amateur photographer, so the first pictures that decorated the pink walls were shots of her vending machine loot posed in different settings. They were crammed into the vinyl backseat of her Volkswagon Rabbit, lined up sandy-pawed at the seashore, swinging and sliding on the jungle gym down the street. By the time Ramona was several months old, Pammy had won so many stuffed animals that it was impossible to corral them. They spilled out of the refrigerator box her husband salvaged from the next door neighbors, and gradually appeared in other parts of the house. A parade of ponies, puppies, bears, and tazmanian devils crept its way out of the nursery and under the bathroom sink, in the cracks of the sofa, on top of the microwave, under the dining room table. Victor had had enough. Taking a plastic unicorn's horn to the tender arch of his foot for the fourth time was enough reason to throw open the front door and, grabbing armfuls of Pammy's objects of obsession, send them on another outdoor expedition.

When Pammy's car crunched into the drive and her bootheels clicked up the walk, she didn't miss a beat when she saw her winnings lying facedown in the grass and smooshed against the chainlink fence. She sat Ramona down amidst the animals and went in to retrieve her camera. Victor had been spying her approach from behind finger-split venetians, and slunk into a dark corner of the livingroom when she entered. He hit the replay button to practice his imaginary spar with Pammy, reviewing his lines in the reenactment until they slid peppery like garlic butter across his tongue. And just where do you have in mind to put all this plasticrap waste of wages? He pictured her feigned wounded shock, her downcast eyes burning swirls into the carpet, avoiding his confrontation. She never was fond of arguing, but when poked with a hot enough prod the words that escaped her bit and scratched like a mad squirrel released from a bag. This time he would be prepared. He wanted to make her see her ridiculous obsession for what it was. Just think of all this useless shit as college money poorly spent! He could almost feel her hand light on his arm, trying to rub away the rage that singed his armhair. It was so typical of her to attempt to manipulate him with her insincere feminine caress.

It would then be his aversion that spurred the next phase of interactions. He knew she would slide her stance to fill his view, no matter where he was looking. He would purposefully look at his feet so she would have to awkwardly crouch and crane her neck up uncomfortably in order to meet his gaze. She looked so absolutely asinine in this position, it was part of his punishment. Then she'd shrug up her narrow shoulders and upturn her palms in twisted supplication. What has gotten into you, honey? All this exertion over stuffed animals? I hope you learn to control your anger before Ramona's memory is crammed with images of her red-faced father stomping around pissed off about her toys. The bitch! She always had to turn it all around onto him. Keep cool. Don't let her fucking conniving get to you. With balled-up fists weighing down his stiffened arms, his clenched teeth would emit a stream of hot air. This is not about my anger, Pammy. This is about your inability to stop bringing home vending machine junk! She would invariably face his confrontation with an accusation cleverly disguised as concern. But honey, it's just not healthy to deal with issues in this manner. When you have a clear head and a calm composure, we can talk about your little complaint. When the argument took this turn, Victor never knew what to do with his next move. Her tactics always incited a frustration so volatile it could detonate with the slightest gesture, the impending concussion wave pervasively destructive.

In the past he would have not had the experience required to ventriloquize the explosion. His only choice then was to follow her sarcastic emotional forgery with forceful ineptitude. He'd take her bait to blow up, and end up being the bad guy, losing the war. But crunched sheetrock, misaligned doorjambs, acrid burnt tires, and fenders dinged on fenceposts taught him an eventual lesson. He would use the undeserved guilt she threw at him as a fuse. He'd devise a Spiderman palm-throw, diving down subterranean at his feet and up through the soles of her slick boots, to that bagged-squirrel bomb ticking in her mindscheme. He knew that if he calmed down, extinguishing any ember capable of igniting the rage, he would only give Pammy the satisfaction she craved. His point would be dulled and ineffective. No, it was essential to accomplish this vicariously obliterating implosion, this ultimate mind-fuck to top her serpentine strategem.

Pammy clicked in through the front door, eyes darting around the room quizically. She didn't see him in the dark corner. She found her camera and returned to the sun slanting obtusely on the lawn. Almost simultaneously, the venetians let in slivers of the dropping light. Slats of sunset illuminated Victor's tense face. He scrutinized Pammy's actions and disposition for deviant intent. She was on her knees arranging stuffed animals around Ramona on the grass. She wet her finger and guided a curl into a loop on Ramona's forehead. Clever distraction, he thought. It would only take a word. He could blow her plan to bits even with the right solitary gesture. He knew it was possible, wars were won with concise single bullets. He struggled to find that all-encompassing definitive action. He replayed the battle once again in its entirety as he watched Pammy snapping her camera in sun-backed arcs around Ramona, cooing and whistling to grab her attention. Wasteful spending. Ramona gummed a rubber pig's ear, hiccuping and squealing as Pammy stood over her. Victor tried out how "Enough" would sound, defined with a throat-cut motion. Check your anger level.  Too unrestrained. He ducked his head down, imagined throwing her a weighted, silent glare beneath heavy brow. Too ambiguous.

Victor absorbed the glimmer of green as the sun hunkered down below the city-scape horizon. Pammy plunged into the pile of plush and plastic, scooping Ramona up and twirled around to face Victor's furtive watch. Could she see him? Her face beamed beatific and she sung a silly teddy bear picnic song, skipping toward the window. She approached the glass so swiftly, so closely, and abruptly spun on her toe, entering the door instead of slamming into the window. "Victor honey," she hummed, "it was about time for Ramona's first yard camp-out. Great idea! Where's the tent?" She fluttered about the house in a stammering waltz, gingerly pecking at detonation wires, disarming him completely.