trivalence
Was it a sense of water, or just a coolness that
became damp as it passed over my skin
a cadence, two measures and anticipated with
and upbeat rest, and triplet, where I scratched off
noteheads, and fitfully placed an “x”
in all the code I’ve written, in dotted eight sixteenth
pairs symbolizing telegraphy, and itself symbol for
more primitive attempts to communicate ;
-the places I’ve left space for speak more clearly.
it’s like the slow heat raising visual clues to untied
conclusions, an
unfamiliar shell which rarely cracks
but bloating and distorting in the heat. I focus on
actual belief, startlingly anticipatory even if I’m
several miles off. when words
have started running off this page
I raise decibels as architecture and throw unfinished
melodies in retreat. and
all I had was words.
I slide my hand
against subterranean structures, slick
railings and futile supports.
Feeling their fractures where commas obscure
lucidity, and the
tape slips from redacted inference
a solitary pole shines holding it’s chill
pressing upward through concrete and
supporting its trivalence.
I think this is what happens, you get into a certain beat, where you're
actually productive, you're making things, you have your
inspiration. Sometimes that art is in taking it and cutting it up
in new ways, for a while I was writing simple lucid poems, and cutting
them towards obscurity. I don't know that I'll ever move away
from that, there's something about this kind of redaction of meaning,
something in the process that really excites me. In some ways it
is the poetic equivalent of reducing some enormous orchestral score to
a solo, trying to capture all of the nuance, all of the grandness of
everything in these simple strokes, at best merely implicating what was
originally there. But, really the thing about the process, the
cutting down of an inspiration to something that feels almost sterile
without some insight as to the source, is that it's an exploration for
the person writing, comparing the original intent with a finished poem,
and seeing what ideas got repressed, or redacted along the way.
The problem has been, artistically, not all of it has been good.
Some of it has been really special, but some of it became much harder
to justify than it should've been, and the cost of sticking to some
rule, some higher logic, over writing good poetry grew sometimes too
high. So, I stopped writing poetry for a little under a month,
seeing if things made more sense, and I think the truth is that the
problem is one of the writer, and not the poems or the style. The
problem is when one is so unwilling to actually share something real,
something truly human, that a form of writing, like the one I've been
playing with, becomes nothing more than an excuse to rip the really
genuine moments out a poem. I wonder if knowing what a poem
like this is about, changes the impact on a reader at all, but
then, I'm also a stickler and don't ever really want to get into the
practice of attaching companion explanations to my poems, so, maybe I'm
just going to have to accept that I am an obscure and abstract writer.
To combat that, I think I've become much more lucid in my music lately,
really looking hard for a purer more direct path. Admittedly it's
somewhat ironic that I choose music to become clearer in, and bury
myself deep into my poetry... but...
At the end of the day, this journal was made so I could communicate
with myself as much as others. I never wanted to have had
non-public posts, let alone levelled filters. Instead, I always tried
to just make my posts themselves obscure enough that unless an
individual knew from some other context what I was talking about, it
would be pretty difficult to actually have an epiphany about my inner
workings from something I posted. Lately it's made me feel like this
journal should just go away, and I should try something else, but, I
also never like to second guess decisions I've already made, and
instead only learn from them for the moving forward time, so it's
unlikely that I would delete my journal, and more likely that I would
just stop posting until I could get back to my ideals of how I wanted
to post. All of this speaks to the broader questions of how I
want to live my life, and the mental inventory that every now and again
needs to be taken to see whether I'm actually living up to that.
Seems like a pretty good little rant to go along with a poem...
and man, how often do I really examine what makes me create? I
wasn't unproductive all day... I wrote this tonight, and worked on a
song, and this morning, I started putting down a theme for a solo piece
that's been circling in my head for a while, but the piano part is
already harder than I could ever play, oh yeah, and I cracked my CMR
for a bit, but did not suceed in the ruckus afternoon of essay catch up
I wanted. I did get a very good grade on the practice essay
though, so that'll be my excuse for that, and for being indulgent, I'll
just blame father's day, because it's convenient and makes it seem like
maybe I have a soft spot somewhere.
Good night all. It's late, and this is a rambly post.