ASPEN HOLYFUNK

Thought of the Day

2012-05-27T04:53:00.000-07:00

When all the right things are too soft
and the worse things are hard—
when you touch your life
and it gives too easily,
like an eaten-out peach
that should be thrown from the barrel—
when you’re a fire waiting to blaze
but can’t find the kindling—
the world is okay.
Even when the tight muscle of sky
relaxes
and hail hails all over—
who could have guessed there’s so much
hardness in the air?—
the world is still okay.

—B. J. Ward, lines to “Something You Haven’t Found” from Landing in New Jersey With Soft Hands (North Atlantic Books, 1994)

On Writing The Poem

2012-05-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

each night she comes to me like music

before the moon

if I drink at her sky
sweetness

and parallel light

signs

branchless trees on the horizon

an entry wound

the speed of each dream leaves a little of my heart

full of nostalgia and hunger

not for love

but a way of surviving

no one knows

no one could ever know

I lift her up within her cage

before the landscape becomes dangerous

I see her picture perfect

her thin gift pierced on a thorn

I rest only when her shrine has been built

Thought of the Day

2012-05-26T03:19:00.003-07:00

“It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”

― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Things Invented and Sung

2012-05-25T20:41:00.001-07:00

Wonder
whisper the mystery
of your most beautiful sin
you are like the dust
of a monk-swept mandala
thrown on the fire
golden river that runs
through me
heartline to paradise
harmonic flux everywhere
one hundred secret portals
wonder… wonder of mine!
feel it desperately
apocalyptic metamorphosis
open!
like infant fingers rising
out of clean, white rice

Thought of the Day

2012-05-25T04:48:00.003-07:00

I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The ‘unsayable’ thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.

—Rebecca Lindenberg

Living in the Motel

2012-05-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

The poem is

an imaginary motel room

in my daydream

The echo of my words

is the ripe sound in the room

The pure promise of everything twists

through my body like a snake

And no one else sees whose wings
come in the night when I call

Thought of the Day

2012-05-24T03:24:00.001-07:00

“There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.”

—Rupert Brooke

Expanse Infallible

2012-05-23T20:58:00.002-07:00

Let infinity be infinity and now now
Enough of head space
Whitebark pine and stinging nettle
Softness has a price
Intense life needs intense language
And any fool
Can smile for candy
And alcohol and drugs and intensity
And the kingdom of the sky
And the saddle view from the top of New York trail
Or fantastical dreams
And the poet who is drunk on the stars
Of some other frequency

Let infinity be infinity and now now
snowmelt water
Yet eternal thirst
That is to say:
I have knocked the guts out of myself
Turkey vultures circling my love
I have stared long at the deadly nightshade
The turkey vultures are not really vultures
I’ve ignited myself
The vultures were devouring my beloved
I’ve traveled without maps over the hot sand
I’ve invoked the muse
I’ve conjured a curse
I’ve dreamt of my daughters
I’ve consorted with magpies
I've died with my shame and I’m alive
When my prayers went unanswered
I howled with the hounds
There was glory in my glance
I was born unenlightened
I awoke to the flapping flight of the great blue heron
I spoke the language that did not say
We were only two on the earth
But we were one on the earth

Marvelous insights were shattered into pieces
Words
Visions

Thought of the Day

2012-05-23T04:40:00.002-07:00

"Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that we cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond the pain."

- Saint Bartholomew

Found Between The Lines

2012-05-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

Breathe in the sky, breathe in the sky which is more than one eternity
clouds rush like wanderers, like fine wind of hopeless hope, or lost bodies
dissolving into wings, so why should he dream of flying someplace better
someway to occupy his mind, time, so often the loss or what keeps him from her
a hole in his atmosphere, a tiny wisp of poem, a kind of reunion

for the time it takes to give heaven a name
for the time it takes to call her name
for the time it takes to breathe a breath beneath the flesh

love takes away

Song of the Day

2012-05-22T03:17:00.002-07:00

Thought of the Day

2012-05-22T03:10:00.000-07:00

Cease trembling and shaking and gasping
and cursing and find again your core which I am.
Rest from twistedness, distortion, deformations.
For an hour you will be me; that is, the other
half of yourself. The half you lost.
What you burnt, broke, and tore is still
in my hands: I am the keeper of fragile things
and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.

–Anais Nin

And So The Blood

2012-05-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

The man is a burning sky of red and orange flames

a dream guides him through hunger

hints of lovely her who shines in his land and

he laughs as walls crumble you can’t understand

things change from red blood sowed

something that gives up mystery behind the silence

this is the moment he feels her breathing

making suns rise within a lost meadow

silver vowels and earth’s blue ballet today

and tomorrow grace and everywhere sweet inspiration

she becomes a purer light their pretty child and grows.

Thought of the Day

2012-05-21T03:37:00.002-07:00

"Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."

- Jorge Luis Borges

All Sighing

2012-05-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

So dreamful

is dawn’s divinity

soft-shaped hills

against blue canvas sky

soothing the red rock cliffs

so sky-tuned

I move deeper and deeper

inside

mythical sunspins

penetrate my mind

as if the last man left on earth

Thought of the Day

2012-05-20T03:49:00.002-07:00

“We must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance or sing a melancholy song.”

—Pablo Neruda

That Place

2012-05-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

At least my flowers, at least my songs!

from Cantos de Huexotzingo

piecing it all together

Tibetan monk banana-sun hats

the sharper focus

the unpainted gourd of the present

predawn redwing vocal warm ups

original essence of the fog-layered landscape

magic of the eternal scene

all things being visions

ranging

large enough to embrace

all my sweet imaginings

and integrated impressions

at the edge of the heart of the sun

Song of the Day

2012-05-19T07:50:00.002-07:00

Thought of the Day

2012-05-19T04:42:00.000-07:00

"All life is a simply dream-like dance of appearance and disappearance of all phenomena. But unless you know this directly, from your own experience, it can seem like pretty cold comfort - especially when times are hard. As Buddhist wisdom for hard times, my Zen teacher, Kobun Chino Roshi, used to say, "Falling apart, falling apart, all together falling apart, it can't be helped." What a relief to know that this isn't a bad dream, it's the nature of everything and everyone - coming together and falling apart, like the elements of a dream."

- Trudy Goodman

Oh, Eyes

2012-05-18T04:37:00.000-07:00

the hero tends to return
now to question the loss with a spirit of healing
and his soul is surely a crow of sorrow
alongside a freshly plowed field
wing shaped trees
cowboy boots
spider bite welts on his hips
and red beans and rice in his bowl

there is so much failure
his joy is big
a squished muley in the ditch along the lonely highway
the milk boy cannot sleep: potted geraniums
under the porch wait to be planted
and he hums
help: I need somebody
help: not just anybody
he longs for her edges and milky sanctuaries
he fills the opening with a howl

and once in a while he smiles with new eyes

Thought of the Day

2012-05-18T01:35:00.001-07:00

Don’t leave me alone with self-
knowledge and these rich, fruitless, unspoken words.

—Dan Albergotti, from “Bad Language” (via straif)

Video Song of the Day

2012-05-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

Unlit

2012-05-17T18:12:00.002-07:00

So many ways ways of touching the springpopping, spectral
colors at the sun's gate.
So many ways of self-quenching inside a dream.
So many ways flesh nurtures its inner name:

blood and breath.

Thought of the Day

2012-05-17T04:33:00.002-07:00

Take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined
… and the sea sang with the murmur of light.

—Octavio Paz, from Sunstone (via sleepinginthesnow)

All His Spectrums

2012-05-16T19:01:00.001-07:00

He lives in dreams
eyes wide open
celebrates his words
turns his love to burning heat
then turns it back to something else
pure and clean
a blue life worth everything
Now