The innards of the clock.

Here are words, and the words that made them. I don't love the words, but I do love the process that stirs them up... and it isn't for me to love, anyway.

I left a bar tonight. As I left, the shades were being lowered - brown venetian blinds. Where the blinds were still raised I could see the bar, a woman, tall and pretty, there talking.
The sensation of it - standing in the cooling quiet street, unlocking my bicycle, ears still popping from the noise of the place... watching inside, a woman's mouth moving over words I couldn't hear. And even that mystery in turn hidden by the dropping blinds. Cut off and cut off again, and let loose on the streets alone, but knowing inside, it was happening.
Around the corner from the bar, a bright green light shone outside a door. All the associations of green came to me, the traffic signal, the joke about green blond women's lipstick, the green of a lawn, the child's game of green and red light, running...
but none of those associations fit. The green was an accident, the light lit a dark closed house. The signal was not for me, racing past. I thought of invitation, of open and closed spaces, I remembered what lay ahead... a rowhouse on Morris st, the second floor always lit, no shades ever drawn. Inside, an oversized stuffed bear, and a painting of the Virgin Mary, a halo round her heart, her hands open to the viewer... nothing concealed.
Again the invitation, but through a private home. An accident, a crossed signal.
The words swirling.

That window is the central theme. Glass, clear, showing and hiding, darkened, lit...


In the crowded pub her lips form words that shatter on
the glass that frames her face.
The dropping blinds obscure her.
The angel approaches.
What doors have blood?
Those children in their beds behind dark windows
cannot know he passes,
counting.
First house has a green bulb shining.
Door fast against the cooling night,
eyes closed, the invitation's cold.
The angel smells no copper:
He'll visit there.
And here? This house hides nothing, night or day.
The virgin holds her heart in light,
her words through the window
are always: "take".
She knows the angel
and the lamb.
Her tears, and the beer, and the spin of the bicycle, and all the revelry behind closed doors
won't stop the night from ending.

He thought the taste of her was baywater.

3am 4/5/11

"Haven't you"?
She sat on a concrete barrier. Gravel and grass beneath. Apartments ahead, and the asphalt lot, and trees and the houses and a small cat observing.
"So weird", he repeated himself, caught in a loop, unable to remember her, hoping she would stay, making himself heard against the roar of his pointless history.
"You said that".
"So weird"
She lived there years ago, he in the house.
The cat lost interest.
He, fumbling at her body.
She unaware spoke of the shows they watched.
He remembered kissing her, first time.
She wandered off. Maybe to a marriage, or employment.
He couldn't pass her father, wide and angry, so he wept in bed.
She passed him in the street and would not stop.
He thought the taste of her was baywater.
He thought she was a hundred other women.
He held her body like it was another body, he could not find her,
so she kicked at stones, and fell a thousand gravities away.
She had twelve children, married twice, kissed goodbye her grandmother.
He stumbled drunk and said "so weird" and could not remember how to open
the kitchen cabinet.




4:43pm 4/5/11

"Haven't you"?
She sat on a concrete barrier. Gravel and grass beneath. Apartments ahead, and the asphalt lot, and trees and the houses and a small cat observing.
"So weird". He repeated himself, caught in a loop, unable to remember her, hoping she would stay, making himself heard against the roar of his pointless history.
She, unaware he'd lost her, spoke of shows they'd watched.
"So weird".
"You said that".
She lived years ago, he in the house.
The cat lost interest.
He, fumbling at her body.
He remembered kissing her, first time.
She wandered off. Maybe to a marriage, or employment.
He couldn't pass her father, wide and angry, so he wept in bed.
She passed him in the street and would not stop.
He thought the taste of her was baywater.
He thought she was a hundred other women.
He held her body like it was another body, he could not find her,
so she kicked at stones, and fell away, a thousand gravities.
She had twelve children, married twice, kissed goodbye her grandmother.
He stumbled drunk and said "so weird" and could not remember how to open
the kitchen cabinet.

In the beginning

When I created this space, I subtitled it "Writing. Practiced." Unfortunately, I let myself be intimidated into silent non-practice by my own first post, which took many, many hours of fevered research, rumination and writing to produce, and which all-told I really liked.

But writing avoided isn't writing practiced at all.

Few of my friends will sing. They fear their own voices, or hate their own voices if those are different. They compare their own sound to the sound of an ideal, whichever sound they love. And this love destroys their voice and cripples them to silence. I argue, sometimes, that singing is for singing's sake. That the act of it is the beauty, and not the result, not the sound.

So with writing. So with any composure of the Tovu-V'Vohu into light, and time, and order.