Every movement I make feels like a prayer.

I am getting married on the spring's solstice, midnight on March 25th.

I cannot articulate how blessed I feel, and so I will simply say: AMEN.

was it Picasso who said; inspiration exists, but it has to find you working?

inspiration found me,

working.

now we move on together. it is a different work than before. it is a different verb entirely. expanding. we're expanding.

Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.

I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.

I’ll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face
of the wall
is God, the face
I can’t see, my soul,

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I’ve forgotten my
idea. The book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind …
the even-numbered pages are
the past, the odd-
numbered pages, the future.
The sun is
God, your body is milk …

useless, useless …
your cries are song, my body’s not me …
no good … my idea
has evaporated … your hair is time, your thighs are song …
it had something to do
with death … it had something
to do with love.

yesterday was a hard day. Not too often do I have those kind of days, those kind of days, you know.

Luckily, I gave it up, but it didn't give me up. Amen to that.

it's a new day, it's early (6:41) a.m, my girlfriend has an italian coffee machine and milk steamer, and lives right down the road from dean and deluca. so life isn't that bad. in fact, it's damn fine. i love her so very, very much, and i love myself and the World Entier. Most days I love so much it leaves a tender ache. So one bad day, that's okay too. Neti Neti. It reminds me how often we (me) forget gratitude. how to be grateful. Neti neti.

Today is a new day. Amen to that.

Alone with the Lonely One

The World arranged itself into a living, breathing, chameleon of signage some eons ago, but she arrived there by seeing faces in the trees.
st francis. one early summer morning, outside her window. 

She cried for joy.

Now the wind sings to her. Now, she is apart from her lover, and she is learning to greet auguries with patience and gratitude and a hint of desperation. her open love mid-stasis, in a slow steady flexing that looks something like breathing.

----

Dan sends me notes from Young's PH seminar's Italy side:

Conferenze Robert Young

1) In this world we don't need medication but education.

2) pH - Perfect Health

44) "Life and death is in the blood." (Moses)

Dan's got the garnet goo on his mind; blood, body, guts. Illness, sickness, disease. Decay. The potential that humanity has to destroy itself without paying attention. What nourishes me, destroys me.

It's the same anorectic allusions to Purity. And I find it equally unhealthy. It doesn't mean he's wrong, or I'm right, or Dr. Young isn't the next life-term Messiah;

it means that one must be careful, above all things, to remember the source. (us)

and not to make it a morality question. if morality enters, so it's written. So it's to be. But again; death on the mind, illness, ooze, decay. Own worst enemies. Magic fountains of red youth begging us to take the temperature.

I don't do well with Daniel's passive judgments about health. For me, or for others. I understand he sees it as dissemination information; I understand he truly believes he says the things he does because he believes he is only worried for me.

I won't battle the scientific rationale; I am sure I'd find most 'facts' true. I am sure I'd try to eat less acidic.

But

Don't make health a battlefield. The body is a temple, help people love it. Don't buy into western medicine's rhetoric. Open your eyes and the source, see Yourself, see your filter. Everything true DOES NOT ask you to open fire. It just asks you to

Open.

I'm open, et tu, brute?

I feel half here. Fatigued- can't even find meaty living Joy in accomplishment. I am plagued by a period of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations. Unseemly Meditations. Auguries and noises; Gory. Loud. Abrasive. Shocking. Surreal. Real. Real, REAL but impossible. Impossible but Real. Is it possible to hurt so much, God? I want to slip into non-being. I can't. I know better. Than even to try and turn off my mind. So I am left with a bubbling, roiling vat of anxiety about D and our potential futures together that lies not very deeply beneath my surface. Minor spikes, fumes - rise up from below. It's natural. It's understandable. But it is entirely and devastatingly unhelpful. Neti neti helps but doesn't cut it. What will? Well, Universe, I take my hands out of the pot. trying to ease the boil only to get burnt. I believe. Happiness is here and now and it is always Enough.

Remember how to let go.

Enough of that, let's try this. I remember now the numinous well being from Assisi; from a glimpse into Eternity.

Perspectives either do or do not lend themselves to inner peace. When you forget, as you will often in the coming weeks, look at the stars and remember. Remember.

How can I remain stuck in this suffering ego and mind when I remember I have and am a piece of the numinous whole? I am holy because all is holy. This pain, too, is sacred.

This is but a blip in the radar of a life, let alone eternity. Remember how you have struggled before, so similarly, struggled with Love and Fear. Remember how it all progressed heedless of your struggle and worry. You worried so much about the possible outcome and avoiding THE MOST TERRIBLE THING EVER (i.e being alone, without that person) and only now can you see all this worrying and turning over did... absolutely, nothing. Absolutely nothing but bring you and yourself suffering. Gave you tunnel vision. Everything happened and your Fear and Worry weren't worth a shit because they are not constructive, inner growth-related emotions.  They address the Lack in one's life. And they tease circumstance towards the same black whole, made up of one mind's entire black hole of Lack.

So Remember.

You know exactly what you're doing, because this moment is perfect the way it is. Even this pain is perfect.

Inner quiet and inner peace and abounding love is just a letting go away.

So, Let Go. To Let Inside.

Universe, I am angry. I am hurt, I am shocked, startled out of myself. I am disheartened. I am so very surprised. When you're taken aback by something, what often follows is a slow dawning realization you shouldn't have been very shocked at all. Which leads to more hurt, more shock, and a heavy heart. Your darkness is showing, Daniel. Showing exactly how at your worst, it clouds out any light, guarding it's own lack of illumination as a matter of life or death. Your intellect shrivels. Your dialecticism selective. And all I hear when you speak is Fear.

I received several potentially hardcore pieces of news regarding my health today. A blood test revealed things that require imminent attention. Not one thing, but 3. Two huge surprises, one less surprising, but equally problematic. I'll postpone my NYC journey til next week because these things require me to stay put and solve them. The body belies the internal struggle of loneliness, stress, and upheaval. I feel guilty, I want to hug my internal organs and systems and tell them how sorry I am. That I'll do better.

Help me help myself, Universe. With my emotional and physical turmoil.

Despite the very real way in which I am continuing to live, act, and plan, short term to long term, despite the very real way in which I am okay, seemingly getting along with whatever I left Dan in San Cesario to do, there is the simple and poignant truth that whatever I do, where I go, however I spend my time, there is this fundamental Lack. That would be Daniel. I feel like a woman whose husband has gone out to sea - I feel both resigned and hopeful and guilty enough to play that martyr's role, for sure. Men ask my friends if I'm married, because I act like I am (?). Married. My soul knows it, and directs my being accordingly. I am his.

I feel so old now, aged and humbled by the raw process which got me to this point. The past 3 months. The decisions I took apart from Dan. The Cosetta I refused, the husband I refused to concede to - the dead stop anguish that nearly knocks me down at odd times. In the car, in the hardware store making spare house keys. Real estate signs. The anguish of choosing not to have the beautiful child of a man whose heart is my own. How could I, his beautiful, he, beautiful, his child, HIS!? Dear god. HIS. a child he enfin wanted to keep, while I did not. he wanted me to, but i did not. I refused love; I want to cry aloud for my mistakes, I want to keen to the sun moon midday but as Mary Oliver said: the world doesn't need anymore of that sound. The choices that got me here, now. Here, sans Dan. The ones that suddenly left me feeling like a woman, and not a girl, a fille, not dani's dolce ragazza, but a woman. I had a choice. I took my decisions, and here I am. I cannot make decisions now based on my past methods. I have changed too dramatically within too short of a time, and I find myself completely without a map of how to figure state-side out. NYC bound. It was I who said bon voyage - technically, I refused the terms of that specific life (and that specific Daniel, san cesario daniel, japan ice man, that probably would remind him of his father, ).

september, san cesario;

-

you bring the house down with your glassed eyes, japan ice-man
rigging the walls to marionette

every charged wrong

a soldier: a hopeless march
my lack of poetry a sensorial vertigo
we have a wake for your writing,
which has
stopped. click pop
stopped, the only revival daime the click clock
of your olivetti.

(firmeza)

the songs about far off chinese virgin marys.
i love you like the moon
i love the death in you but

you bring the temperature down,
walking as if taking a beating while this
woman waits, trying to love you, japan ice-man

-

Maybe we're both out to sea. Drifting towards true North. Despite the way we continue to live, act and plan short to long term, there is the fundamental truth of that Lack and I want my darling, I want my daniel, my best friend. to heal, to come together on both of our individual terms. I cannot sacrifice myself to love, not anymore and never again, not even for this Love Supreme. ESPECIALLY not this love supreme. you dig? I cannot and will not tailor nor tame myself for anyone besides myself, and I refuse daniel's violet violence, his touching but consuming dark tendencies which try to conquer me. The female in me reacts in kind. He's always had me in a state of heat. I cannot have enough of him. What he hasn't realized yet is he already has, (conquered me) from the first time he made love to me and I was shaking like a leaf, he had and he has me, completely. Body, heart, mind. With that comes the responsibility of respecting the partner enough to let them come to their own conclusions (about drinking, etc). The challenge of letting go of what you imagined, what you think could or should be, versus the actual companion along for this monogamous ride. This ain't no chess game baby, and you ain't got no right. I know there's Kate one and logistically I am Kate 2 (with lazzerr vision!) but your flashbacks of ebgert and her suprise pregnancy, they cost us. More than you know.

journal entry - san cesario

--

I am caterwauling into the universe for you, husband. You almost made me a mother - the mother of your children. Almost. I found Japan ice-man on his beach chair eating 40-minute salsa and nachos. Staring into the East with brown eyes flashing in such controlled violence they appeared black. All you were was two obsidian eyes and calm piano hands, the light dark shaman monk became THE darkness finale, and spoke to me with a serpent's tongue. You shot the words to the east. To me, like they were clips- you were a loaded weapon. and the shot hit the target. "I'm going to get a vasectomy." You looked at me then, facing my compass center,  North, and held my gaze with your two obsidian orbs, melanoid. Onyx eyes through skin a round from a machine gun. Fury, you were, an imploding supernova. your eyes turned dead again in the span of seconds.

I had heard enough. it was the last sentence I expected, it might have been the only one that could break my heart. I could take anger, terror, frustration, uncertainty, or anything human. In that exchange, my animal (rabbit) heart was mortally wounded. With the deadpan delivery of such concentrated, icy rage. by the selfishness, the absolute childishness of you, the clumsy devastation you wreaked without paying attention. The cosetta we made, I waited for your verdict. Human fallacy or frailty aside, japan ice-man, that was it. i waited with an open mind and heart, you had nothing to fear. there were no traps, only options.

those four words decided it for me.

--

We can heal from this.  I am waiting. I refused your terms, I refused and I left. But Daniel, I can never, ever refuse you.

The Journey / Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- - -

Somehow this poem by Mary Oliver, so honest so simple, and the New Yorker article on Jean Paul Gaultier amalgamated together then distilled to give Voice to a new Realization of mine over a garage side cigarette. It was the first snowfall of the season in Connecticut last night, turning from rain to sleet to snow sleet to powder within the dinner hour 7pm. I went to town to buy cigarettes and:

In front of your windshield the snow flies at you in a furiously immaculate firework kaboom (ker-bloom, winter flower), rain to snow more prismatic, snow headlight kaleidoscope. The radio dial is set to "I Choose Free Will" by Rush circa '85, and the Universe is telling you in all ways that this, (this, here, leaving to come to be able to leave again) is Good. This, was Right.

Japan ice-man, where are you, what position are you sleeping in and of what do you dream? Who do you smile at now first thing in the morning, whose face do you see first? Claudio, most likely. Take it and laugh at it, dude. Laugh so you can take it.

Your (animated) face over skype slices me. I momentarily panic - why did I leave, why in God's name did I get on flight EI0108, on a plane that brought me even farther from you? Away from my glow-worm heart, my Japan ice-man, my dark saint, the eclipsing moon to my sun, my friend, my confidante, mentor, teacher, creative equal, partner, lover, soulmate, husband?

All of this is a tough order, but we're the (tough) customers who ordered it. Bene.

You looked tired, darling, but still so very beautiful. <> This is where you're supposed to be. Stop flagellating yourself. Stop assuming pain equals progress or processes worthwhile by default, or that trials are something you've inexplicably earned and are subjugated to. Stop punishing yourself and listen to your heart. My Daniel, my husband. Stop choosing pain because it is all you know - because it is all you've ever known. Stop repeating - listen to your own wisdom. I am here, waiting, working with the universe to help (you/us) break this cycle. Your tautological funerary altar-mindset, where you stay, vigil sitting. Not seeing the difference between sanctity and sanctimoniousness.

I often recall the experience I had in the pool now just to my left outside as an 8 year old. I've spoken of it before - when on a hot summer afternoon a slow lazy august rain began to fall. slowly, as if testing itself out. My attention was caught then arrested absolutely by the experience of seeing a lone raindrop hit the top of the placid pool water. The axial raindrop gave way to the usual continuing circles - the aftereffect of one rain drop that becomes ringed others, the wake of water drop premier. Bulls-eye effect. I recalled it once again this morning as I contemplated destiny - and if I was following mine.

Until today, I have always recounted the experience as such; as the second, third, fourth etc raindrops fell on the surface, the rings began to run towards eachother, to collide. Sudden chaos because of connectedness and consequence. I must have always been eccentric because for a week, a week afterwards I was literally speechless because the concept of action and reaction occured to me. All we do, all choice we make in life has reprecussions so minute yet more powerful than the original choice (raindrop). And life is a soup of these interconnecting interacting after effects results. Everything, every choice, every thought, suddenly weighed so much as to shock me into in-action. I was petrified because I realized I could never see the complete picture. How that action affected others and how those other actions (not even my own!) play off eachother to create the landscape of existence. The state of reality as a fission fusion collision and to my 8 year old brain, the chaos of existence was too much. When you're 8, things are because they are and you aren't particularly preoccupied with existential considerations.

When I was 8, until now, I feel as if I've been grappling with myself and the question of chaos as a natural state of reality. The fact that I couldn't plan or maneuver in the wake of this one variable uncontrollable phenomenon.

This morning I realized I had moved onto Phase 2 - realizing that the point was the Chaos. That the point was I was coming to the question from a cerebral, analytical brain. I have that tendency - I can be dry to a fault, my mind can play machine too well. I saw it all 2 dimensionally, so of course the 3rd dimension terrified me. Now, suddenly, since striving to live a 3-d existence spiritually intellectually hoslitically, I see the Order of Chaos. Of destiny being here and now, and Everything is Perfect in its way and all we can do to say thank you is to live that truth.

To stop being obsessed with the raindrops and more concerned with swimming in the body of water they join to make. Perspective is choice - it is a choice when you grow enough to realize the other truths. Then you are asked to make a choice to remain that 8 year old and pursue those nature of existence reality and man Kierkegaardian dialogues 'the human 'condition'' as an adult, or...

to take the Leap and learn to Live.

In that seething, gorgeous primordial muck-up of consequence reactions that turned out to be, all along, Destiny.

---