Cottonwood. A Poem.

This is an utterly random poem/thing I spontaneously wrote today while picking up a load of hay for my sister's horse. We drove by a slough and it had just rained and the window was down. I've always loved the smell of wetlands, water, marshes, rivers, and cottonwood trees...so this weird poem was born. If you can call it a poem.


Trees, you grow by the water.
I smell you.
Cold breeze, cold day, moist is the cool cool air on which your scent claws it's way to me, bloody and sweet like the dew of deep sewer gods. A bitter sweetness of rotting things and liquid. Ducks.
Your light reproduction would float on the gentle winds, tufted and soft, but the air is too thick with recent rain.
Trees, you grow by the water and your veins are filled with its fragrance.
Silvery bark and whispering leaves.
I smell you.
Mud is between your toes, oozy and dank like the meme. Dead things are in it and live things, squirming. Life is struggle and tiny lives burrow in the muck, fighting and killing and eating. Between your toes. If you could wiggle them, you would crush millions of lives. And duck shit.
I smell you.
Rotting grass, you are sweet and caress the ankles of the naked tree. Erotic and slimy.
Towering over it all, you grow by the water and clap your tiny, multidunious hands in a fluttering rhythm like Björk. You are not Björk, but a cousin to that pale-skinned saint-tree.
You grow by the water and its music lulls you to sleep so that you do not move your toes and squish the dark muck between them in oozy fountains of duck shit.
Sleep then, and do not kill...until the lightning strikes and your boughs crack and fall down down down through the yards of sparkling air to crash through the rusted roof of a Nissan and crack the ball cap of a scuzzy trailer park red neck.
I smell you.
Cottonwood.

A More Positive Piece of Personal 'Poetry'

Happiness
Happiness has been made into myth.
We seek it, we yearn for it.
We dream of soft, gold-colored days, foggy with impossibility, and tinted with shimmering desire. Always in the future, future-bound.
We say if I had this, I would be happy. We say, happiness is thus and thus, and since thus and thus are missing, happiness cannot be here. Dreaming is good, dreaming gives us hope when it is dark, gives us the ability to move forward.
But if we are asleep: if we dream too hard at all times, we fill our eyes full of glittering gold so bright we cannot see the gold that shines around us.
With our virtual reality headset we see a great golden chalice, brim-full of Mead. We reach for it, but our hand passes through, unable to grasp this beautiful vision, which is not vain in and of itself, but focusing on it at all times prevents us from seeing the shining cup of joy that sits beside it in the real world erased by the vision of the alternate, virtual reality.
Dream. But be content.
Contentment is the secret to happiness, and it is available at any time. Not just tomorrow.
Remember to drink deep the cider of autumn while its beauties surround you, though you might yearn for the sweetness of spring. Remember to bask in the sun-glow of friends while they surround you.
Remember.
Happiness is now.
Happiness is always there, just like sadness. All you have to do is look.

Alien Jungles

   Sometimes, writing feels like an alien compulsion; the words well up from within, unstoppable. They will be put down on paper, and they will do it now, regardless of what you want.
   The story is an extraterrestrial entity, taking possession of your body in order to express itself. 

   And other times...You battle onward, abandoned by your infernal Muse to hack through a dangerous jungle on your own. You keep going because you can't just leave that story out there in those wastes. It may have abandoned you, but you will never abandon it. Once you have tasted madness, you will never go back.
   Why?
   Why seems an irrelevant question. To those who know, it does not matter why. It only matters when. When can I do it again? It's that 'sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring' (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life). It's a frantic waltz with the sublime.
   The imagination bubbles and simmers, taking things in, eye of newt and toe of frog, boiling them, changing them. The imagination is a witch's cauldron, frothed by the flames of the senses, stirred by the mundane, the mystical, and the beautiful in life. And it is fraught with peril.
   You have gone out into the fetid coiling vines, the nest of vipers and of bird eating spiders. You are unarmed, unprotected.
   "I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." (William Butler Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven ). You are exposing your soul when the reader opens your pages.

   It is a danger worth risking, a peril both terrifying and delightful. What kind of alien entity is controlling you? You suspect it is not a terrible black chitinous endoparasitoid. You suspect it is more of an ethereal silvery exctoparasitoid that only occupies you briefly as a cocoon and then develops fully outside of you, a papery butterfly covered in colorful wings and filled with magic.

   Metaphors can be dangerous, especially when mixed. Ravenous mongrels, those.

   Be careful, be wary. The jungle is deep. The way is difficult but the rewards are bountiful.

                                                                     *

   

      I was supposed to talk about what inspired me to write, but I got sidetracked into a metaphorical murmuring. I can't really nail down where my inspiration comes from. As I've indicated above, it seems a very myriad source. I am often inspired by very vague mysteries, an image, a sound that holds a feeling, theme, or certain psychological sensation. Visuals especially. I can watch a film and be captured by a single shot, inspired by the possibilities of one image. I'm always inspired by other books. Little fragments here and there break off of material I read, see, or listen to and collect inside me. The writer is not only a cocoon but a fertile field where seeds are sown and grow into wild new hybrids. Ravenous mongrels. The fields become wild again, jungles.. Bountiful jungles.

"Zeus Split" from the poem by Jamie Evans

This painting is inspired by Jamie Evans' poem "Zeus Split," which you can read here.

I read the poem and was struck by it. I decided to paint it but wasn't entirely sure how to go about it. The poem evokes all kinds of imagery so it was hard to decide what to go with. I finally decided to take the 'glossy sky' and contrast it with the sea and sand. I'm not too sure about my marshmallow clouds...