the TRUTH of things as only Richard Brautigan can speak it

“As the bruises fade, the lightning aches.

Last week, making love, you bit me.
Now the blue and dark have gone 
and yellow bruises grow toward pale daffodils,

then paler to become until my body 
is all my own and what that ever got me.”

—	Richard Brautigan, “As the Bruises Fade, the Lightning Aches” 4 mc

Writings from Walleye #4 9/15/2013

 

art by Morgaine Faye 

 

I writhe beneath your gaze, the fierceness of your black, animal eyes singeing the hair on my body.  The leaves crunch beneath me on the forest floor, my head rests on a bed of moss.  In the darkness I hear small footsteps as little lives scurry past my ears, I hear the insects as they work their way through the soil.  I open my chest to you, offering up my heart and other precious organs.  Suddenly, my mouth is flooded with the taste of iron, your muzzle stained red as I am devoured and fall further into the gentle arms of the Earth.

 

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Once, I slept as a mountain, dreaming through many thousands of years.  Pieces of me carried South with the water, pieces of me carried North with the wind.  Every cloud and star had a name that left my head upon waking.  The Sun was my day skin and the Moon my night.  Hunters made their homes deep within me.  I was never still but instead the whole of me followed gently and passively the steady tumble of the rest, through the void.

 

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The winds held us aloft until we had come to the desert. We drifted off to sleep to strange and unfamiliar bird cries, not quite a caw but something similar.  As we slept, the sands scoured our skin away, leaving only bones, the wind making instruments of us as it sang and whistled it's way through the cage of who we were.  The darkness grew and we were no longer there.  We were the blackness between, a blanket for the stars to rest in.

Randomness from my journal

To be able to hear something, it must first be speaking to you.  Speaking is the act of delivering information through sound.  Everyone, whether they realize it or not can hear a bird sing, "I am bird and I am here.".  The more you listen and the more you learn what you are hearing, the more the bird will tell you.  It will say, "I am woodpecker and I am hungry." or "I am robin and I am alone but want not to be.".

This understanding can be reached with any of the five senses.  You can learn to "hear" more with not only your ears but also your eyes, nose, mouth or skin.  There is so much hidden information contained in a kiss.  The tongue of your lover against your own, floods you with tastes, new visual perspectives should you open your eyes, the feel of the roughness of their taste buds and the coded smells of their arousal.  Learn and notice these sensations and you can read your lover as a Holy Book.

Writings from Walleye Vol. #3 7/15/13

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There is an ache in my shoulders from breaking trees.  The muscles pulled tight from the rise and fall.  My legs still shakey with the energy of last nights tremblings.  And all this time I was a ghost, haunting familiar terrain, where I shouldn't have been.  In sleep, I have been aware of a warm, black presence that is in my heart but that I am only given seconds to caress.  Death and sleep being so similar that sometimes the threshold blurs and you can float back and forth and find a true love dwelling there.

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What would happen to a flower, if it chose not to bloom?  To not uncurl and show it's center, the truest reflection of the sun.  How would it dance with the breeze, a shy partner hiding itself in the corner of the room, hoping it's singular magnificence goes unnoticed?  A subtle shift is all it needs to open up and become that living thing it was meant to be, a golden heart at the center of a stem.

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A Three Lined Score
1.  The sun hits it's zenith and instead of continuing West, returns East.
2.  There is a zoo and it is on fire.
3.  A hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower, freezes and falls dead.

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A Sea Wall That Longs to Break
1)  Why does it want to break?
2)  What will happen when it breaks?
3)  How will the breaking impact it's surroundings?
4)  What will the wall be after it breaks and is no longer a wall?
5)  What function will it serve in it's new form?
6)  Will it miss being a wall?
7)  Does it understand that once it isn't a wall, it can never be the same wall again?
8)  Do any of these questions even matter to the wall?

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The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

—Pretty Shield,
Medicine Woman of the Crows
transcribed and edited by
Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing   

his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it  
and I have gone burning  
to meet him, the jacklight  
fills my eyes with blue fire;  
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
from my mouth, sit up laughing  
and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him,
a lean gray witch
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house
drinking coffee till dawn
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
crawling back into my shadowy body.
All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.  
Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.  
Not even with his goodness.

If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.

Louise Erdrich

Dance Floor Love

 

I think it is safe for me to assume that anyone reading this is most likely someone I know and probably someone I know fairly well.  Otherwise, you have better things you should be doing!

 

For years, I have had a near phobia quality relationship with the idea of dancing.  The mere thought of it started my heart racing.  It was not uncommon for me to feel the need to flee a social situation, when my much braver friends tried to goad me into joining them on the dance floor.

 

This all changed for me at a Halloween party, last October.  I had ingested just the right amount of chemicals, was surrounded by just the right people and the music playing was just the right sort of music, to get my butt in gear.  In the name of honesty, I will also mention that the fact that I was wearing a mask surely helped the situation.  It was a great, triumphant, life changing night for me and when everyone else wanted to go home, I wanted to stay.  Being to nervous to remain alone, I sadly made my feet stop moving.

 

Since this night, I have danced a handful of times and it has become my favorite thing to do.  I have been dancing at least once over the last four weekends and there was even one weekend in there, where I danced on both Friday and Saturday nights.

 

This last Friday, I went with a dear and special old friend out to Soul Night.  This is a monthly event that she has been attending for years.  She even has a VIP token on her key ring, which gives her free entrance.  This was the best night of dancing I have had yet.  The music that the dj's played was amazing and had much more "soul" (which might seem obvious, seeing as it was Soul Night), than the electronic music I had danced to the two previous weekends.

 

Another important moment of this night, was my discovery of Dance Floor Love.  There is something incredibly primal and animalistic about dancing.  I have never felt more comfortable and present in my body.  As someone whose self esteem isn't always the greatest, this can lead to some unfamiliar feelings of attractiveness.  These feelings, coupled with the intake of alcohol can lead you to feeling completely smitten with someone, after only a few minutes of watching them dance, thus, you are in Dance Floor Love.

 

While we were dancing I noticed a young woman, who was wearing a baggy grey, workout shirt made out of some sort of stretch material.  She had on shorts that I know must of come from a thrift store because they just don't make shorts like this anymore.  Her hair was pulled tight into a bun at the top of her head.  I'm not exactly sure why but something about the way she moved was completely stunning and beautiful to me.  I spent much of the night trying to be in the same vicinity as her, in the hope that somehow we would end up dancing together.  We danced near one another and even bumped elbows at one point.  However, being me, I made no attempt to talk to her.  In setting such as this, I feel incredibly worried about coming off as a sleazy guy.  I think this fear stems from seeing lots of guys act sleazy and make women feel uncomfortable, so the idea of chatting someone up, is probably not something I will be doing any time soon.  However, the whole situation was enough to remind me, how incredibly beautiful people can be, when they are comfortable in their bodies.  People can really be stunning animals, when they allow themselves to be.

 

I now have added to the list of traits that I would like to find in a potential partner, a love of dancing.  There is nothing that seems better to me than spending hours swaying in step, with someone you love, to the pounding of music.  I'm sure my ex-girlfriend, who loved to dance and always hated that I didn't, would be a bit angry if she read this but we all grow and learn at our own pace.

 

So, of my three major identified fears, I have now made friends with two of them, the dark and dancing.  Now all I have left to do is to figure out how I can befriend death and life should be a cake walk.  I'm just noticing as I type this that all three of the major fears in my life begin with the letter d.  Not sure why that is worth pointing out but there you have it.

 

Love,

Allan

A(r)MOR(e)

Greed and Aggression by Sharon Olds

Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats,
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into it's nature, the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the the throat of the held goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger and the
making of new tigers, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of an animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouth's running into sleep.



"I look. I look so hard it becomes an embarrassment-
and then I see eyes. Lion eyes. Two amber beads with
a brown matrix. Circles of contentment until I stand;
the lion's eyes change, and I am flushed with fear.

"Quiet," Samuel whispers. "We will watch for a while."

As my eyes become acquainted with lion, I begin to distinguish
fur from grass. I realize there are two lions, a male and
a female lying together under the stingy shade of a thorn tree.
I can hear them breathe. The male is breathing hard and fast,
his black mane in rhythm with the breeze. He puts his right
paw on the female's shoulder. Ears twitch. We are no more
than ten feet away. He yawns. His yellow canines are as long
as my index finger. His jowls look like well-worn leather. He
stands. The grasses brush his belly. Veins protrude from his
leg muscles. This lion is lean and strong. No wonder that in
Maasai mind ever aspect of a lion is imbued with magic.

Acting oblivious to us, he moves to the other side of the tree.
From the protection of the Land Rover, we spot a fresh kill. It
is a wildebeest whose black flesh has been peeled back from a red
scaffolding of bones. The lion sits on his haunches and feeds.
He separates the wildebeest's legs with his paws and slowly sinks
his teeth into the groin. He pulls and tears large strips of meat.
With his head tilted, his carnassials shear more muscle and viscera
from the body cavity. His rasping tongue licks the blood from
the bones. Ribs snap. His claws clamp down on the wildebeest as
though escape was still possible.

The carcass is like a cave that the lion enters. He growls, and the
female joins him. He nibbles her ear and then licks her face and
neck. I am startled by his bloodstained muzzle. Side by side, two
lions devour their prey."

-From "An Unspoken Hunger" by Terry Tempest Williams