Regulated by windfalls and the spell cast
by gray refineries, the nightfall blankets
an East Coast sky with the stain of port wine
spilling across golden thrones,
vacant and waiting;
a stranger’s hand can seem so familiar
when walking without direction,
seeking home.
Six weeks later the thought
of a remembered pregnancy leaps
into the surface of awareness,
pushing against skin, a Priest anointing
the newly saved: So much demand
within the stillness, a grave-digger’s paradise,
slippery yet within reach,
as the mud settles in with toxic ashes
thrown from the factory’s glare.
See how simple a child’s smile can be,
devoid of what it has longed for,
open and trusting, not yet malformed
by the apple and the razor’s edge.
Urgent caution in whispers, a time past,
the safety of the principal’s office,
the night nurse staring between
files of incrimination, not believing
in the twisted intestines that spasm
to the thrill of the day.
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Rolling
metaness
James M. Emmerling
Chuck A. Stetson
Jimenace
Newton Fortuin
Salon.com
Comments
I sat in that Principal's office; James' father was my high school principle. That office wasn't safe. Rated!
at lunch a waitress whispered to me this:`
Please go eat somewhere else. you stinky.
at the hair salon ... the manicure is pricey.
Fathers Day. Place in yard plastic flamingo.
Reads inspire. Ya eat a bowl soft blueberry.
After pondering and honest analysis of news.
I've a question:`Do you like serrated `tatters?
Would you love a mashed potato blue hairdo?
peece!
dj
night falls..staining the Eastern sky a portwine. color...port, a strong dark red fortified wine of rich taste & aroma..."red sky at night"...sailor's delight...but...also a purplish superficial hemangioma of the skin..a birthmark..we all got those, tangible or not...i happen to have 2 small burn scars acquired at age 2 on my face that runed my childhood, to put it mildly...
stains....yet royal...red was the original color of royalty..spilling over the vacant golden thrones...2 of them?...his & hers?
my favorite dylan song is the much maligned "when the night comes falling from the sky", from 1985's "empire burlesque"..."i dont wanna be a fool/starving for affection/ i dont wanna drown/ in someone else's wine..."in the night is a nurse, guarding? attending? the files...of incrimination:proof of fault...of some crime...yet she is incredulous in the face of squirming twisted guts that spasm to the break of day...it is beyond her experience...and she a nurse!!...?
nurse: the most vaunted female profession...i deal with them all the time,
like Blake's Daughters of Beulah: they create a sweet soft moonlit night of rest and recuperation...safety & love & dreams...protection perhaps from the hellish world o f the factory's ashy toxic mud...that intrudes even into the world of the newly saved & anointed...to be saved in the world of this poetic universe is no real guarantee...a world where lost children
wander, still innocent, open and trusting, lost,seeking home, yet devoid of what they long for...
the apple is perhaps thrown down from the tree in the windfall...for windfall means fruit blown down by the wind...also unexpected bounty. Windfall regulates this night of possibility & danger, along with the spell of the refineries, where some precious natural substance is processed...
memory plays a big part in this little masterpiece...are there memories stored in those damn files the night nurse guards? is that her thing? to guard the static past, while intestines here, now, in the daybreak spasm....in thrill? ...(my own guts, by the bye, are the reservoir & tuning fork of my psyche...i suffered terrible stomach aches in the anxiety of my youth...but that's neither here nor there i guess...). memories...including...whispers in the still silence of a past time..could it be childhood??...my own childhood was blessed by the safety of my Dad's office at the high school, from which...well, to my childish eye he ruled the world....
children...and...memory of pregnancy...birth image , nothing more "natural" than that..fortifying the spiritual image of salvation ....very nice there!....
and...it's a night of hushed expectancy, urgent caution in the newly found salvation...the raw existential shock of being saved! yet....always always recriminations & "blame-gaming" to steal it away...
a priest anoints..that is his task...but it bothers me he's there..i dont like em....who gives em the right to hand out heaven? i think of blake's amazing (off-color!) take on sexual bliss:
"embraces are comminglings from the head even to the feet/and not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place"...i guess the mention of "slippery yet within reach" right after the "skin" reference got me gong down...certain avenues of thought...but what the hell is wrong with that??
the slippery wet sweetness is polluted by toxic mud from the factory's incessant f...king glare...doesnt take Freud to figure that one out...the predicament of the female today, alas..poisoned , commodified, and put up for sale....a factory of cosmetics maybe...
i might have gotten off point here....so much DEMAND in this expectant hushed night...how to meet it all? or some of it? or...is it the simple ungratified longing of the child, for safety & finding home again? is that what we all demand? of whom? how can we expect to get it in this night of red skies & portentousness?
vacant & waiting , those thrones..hey! it's lovely Prince william's birthday...but i get the sense that's not the royalty you mean...we must have royalty of the spirit, alive & gasping to birth , guts roiling in the blaze of the New Day...
Jim. Thank you very much...
is she regulating this night? How is she connected to all these
GODDAMN INCRIMINATIONS? I hope to god or goddess she is not the source of them, but I fear and project ususally that SHE is...
Why does she not believe in the twisting guts? Does she seek to CURE them, God help her? Is caution and safety and a peaceful slumber in this red night all she offers?
The royalty is of course within. That's cliche stuff. The thrones are there to be occupied with competence born from confidence in your own regalty. Incriminations? The Queen shouldn't be bothered by them...it is SHE that denounces....
and forgives. Forgiveness is, paradoxically, her weapon, her sword.
. . .
Nature, ripe and raw and Terrible...that is always, always the Enemy....to give birth is sticky and slippery and messy...
Blake, "Jerusalem": plate 30:
"I hear the screech of childbirth loud pealing,
and the groans of death...in Albion's clouds dreadful
uttered all over theEArth:
What may man be?
who can tell! but...
what may woman be?
to have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave.
there is a throne in every man, it is the throne of God
this, woman has claimed as her own,
and Man is no more!"
Good! I hear a chorus of women saying. But...
the principal is a man, and his safety, his hand offered to the stranger, is rough and hard and...unappealing. The child, Fatherless, will always be devoid . The nurse will of course forever do her duty, and sacrifice, and be torn to pieces by the Agony of
creation. She is Mother Nature's "nightengale", and
she flies around with her bandages, here and there...
(this is not getting at all misogynistic, or...well...maybe it is...but these are universla, archetypal subjects, of course, beautifull poetically abstract & universal, so no offense be taken....)
huh. I just wish the war of the sexes was over. (i vaguely remember writng a post where i declared it done)Nature groans & pleads for it to be done. Tend to the simple child's smile...no more destroying their innocence and telling them, well, that's just the way it is:despair and labor. More birth, forever & forever, amen. The generations of humans endlessly proliferating...to what purpose?
. . .
" a gravedigger's delight", indeed.
Jim, Blakean & in the Wide Open for awhile
at least....
(yay, OS!)
As for me, I have long been a "system buster," and history shows what happens to people like me. I just don't know when to keep my mouth shut and "go along"...I once heard it said that evolution occurs at the edges - just go examine any tide-pool. Some of us lurk at the edges inviting change, and change is nearly always terribly threatening to one's ego, as well as the "egoic mass" (group-mind)...The trick is to embrace and invite simultaneously, without the embrace turning into the "grip of death" to the person experiencing this aspect of 'the dance', i.e., experienceing the "invitational" dance...I have become relatively adept at this in my professional life, but then again, I had to leave nearly all the systems I worked within and find a way to work for myself, free from the piles of incriminations and the stern stare of the nightnurse, to be able to work in the manner I choose...And it was worth all that I went through to get here.
("thank you", "thank you" ,etc etc)
The system needs busting. There's no safety in it. It is the Task of the Very Few (in the Bible, they are unfortunately symbolized in stark apocalyptic terms)
to create pockets of safety. New principal hired. His office is "safe as houses", as they say....How can we know? Because He has been through it all, and He...in all his faces and bodies all over the world...has had enough of danger....and He has finally realized that it s in his, as well as everyone else's,
best interest to create a safe zone. It is a purely selfish action for Him. As all actions are. For all actions are made by the same I. Always.
We reach that I, and we lose it. We yearn for it again, and we set about reaching it again. When we realize we are ALWAYS THERE is when finally we rest, really rest, in...um...eternal trust, perhaps.
But it won't arrive byanyone else's actions but...our own...
Paradoxical to talk like this, feels like slipping back & forth between i/Identities...but this is the Way it is....deal with it!
(The nightnurse has her place in this Nouveau-Platonic Republic of people doing what they are equipped---not forever, but for now---to do)(She's a bitch, though...)
j
This could segway into a discussion of Safety: The definition of Safety, and, what I might call "the tryanny of striving for s/Safety" (little self/selves and "big" Self implied)...I guess I am in a mood for exploring tyrrany...and how does 'tyranny' tie into the vacant thrones, by the way...?
Well, I am off to see clients: People who pay me to bust their s/Self-limiting internalized, introjected, and external/ized systems so that new selves and systems can be born...!
(Does this just mean that the 'cage' is simply expanding, getting bigger, so that we do not see its parameters, thereby fooling ourselves into believing we are not actually in a cage at all? Probably, but, it is a matter of perception, isn't it? And if so, I am nothing more than a clever illusionist!)