City of Legends

I wrote a poem today to a friend.  Yes, a female friend.  No, not that "Sunday girl" everyone is bitching at me for writing so much about and now won’t be able to figure out of they are disappointed in me or relieved because I wrote of someone else.  Give me a break, I wrote "the Goldenheart Cycles" in the midst of my affair with the Panther.

How about both?

I am not so absurd as to assume because I have written a few…er…a few dozen…ell, maybe a hundred poems about someone (White Sunday) that their feelings in any way reciprocate mine.  I have learned the lesson many times in many ways that, even with a public commitment (ahem, you know who I am talking to)  affections are tenuous.  I am, to some degree, certain that the next time a woman says "I love you" in that way, I will have a hard time believing her.  I hate developing a bit of a rind, but I think I have done remarkably well, all things considered, at holding my head up over the aeons.

I digress.  Again.  Nice to know some things do not change.

The relationship between myself and "White Sunday" is an absurdity of its own flavour, and one I am not of a mood to explain.  In her I find all that I like in a woman…and all that has complicated my relationships with other women.  I have leapt from higher cliffs on longer odds and shorter bets.  But I admit we are still in the "courting" stage, and the odds do not favour me.

But there are other women whose companies I enjoy.  No, not that way, keep your mind out of the gutter.  I have been a strangely good boy for quite some time, which seems to frustrate a few people.  Tough.  This is my game, I am playing by my rules for my purposes.  I mean to exchange writings and to draw inspiration from. 

Earlier today I was once again struck by a certain friend who is overwhelmingly beautiful, and creative.  So I warned her I was going to write her a poem…which I did.  It is called "I do not chase the wind" and it about not going after woman who are impossible to win.  I think of the poem and I smile, as it is both true and ridiculous.  I have won the heart of more than one woman in my life who was beyond me, out of reach, impossible.  From the brilliant and beautiful Psyche, to the alpha-Amazon Valkyrie, to the lingerie-model lesbian Leopard to the creative, sensuous and quite-distant Aubergine, there is a spectrum of madness there…on my part.

Even at this time in my life, I still seek, not anyone, but the one.  The person I can live out my life with, even if the ride sometimes gets bumpy and crazy.  We’ll see what happens over the next few years.  I figure it will take about two years to see what is to become of me in that realm.

In the meantime, enjoy the new poem, "I do not chase the wind":

I do not chase the wind
for it cannot be caught
and after I have fought
my way to the mountaintop
there would be no way to go
but down.

I do not chase the wind
for dreams are for their time
and I am wise, if past my prime,
and know how not to make an ass
of myself by thinking above the waist
sometimes.

I do not chase the wind
for it is but a metaphor
or five or six for the war
between the soul and the flesh
damned to fail and wail at rainbows
"Not fair!"

I do not chase the wind
for it would not be fair,
although if I would dare,
she might find me swift of foot,
carrying my golden apples of
poetry.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.

And it is a question, as visitors to my Amomancer blog clearly see that I am not currently writing to a single central inspiration of the female persuasion.  The fire is there, the focus is not.

Huerta the other day sent me a frowning emoticon, , when I expressed that I need to find a new major muse.  The fact she frowned tells me that there is much ignorance, even amongst my closest circle, as to what a muse is to me.

God, or rather, Goddess.  Simply put.  But with an explanation.

Not to replace the one true God, but to give me a focus as a writer, which is, perhaps more than man or human or liberal Democrat who has been married and divorced twice, my most evident self-definition. 

The furnace of my passions burns as hot as ever just as the core of the Earth itself is a molten mass of radioactive isotopes and stone.  But without a path for release, what you (and I, and the world) get are small volcanic outpourings, just enough to keep me from being torn apart.  They are impressive in and of themselves, but they are not Krakoa.  And I, personally, am a big fan of Krakoa-sized eruptions (see Psyche, Panther, Brigit, The Goldenheart, Aubergine and even the Leopard).

I am, by my very nature, a monogamist.  I believe in, I celebrate, I enjoy having one person that I can revolve around, like the Sun for my planet to orbit.  I find no shame in that, in basking in a radiant glow that warms and nurtures me.  Without it, my "planet" dies a slow death.  Not just from the lack of heat, but also the tidal forces that pull and stretch, toss and catch me as I spin through a remarkable universe.  Those forces rip me up inside and keep the heat burning, the magma churning and I, myself, learning what is good and beautiful and foul and fair and truth and illusion.  These are the reasons I get out of bed in the morning, these are the reasons to lay down beside someone else at night.

And I have to admit, I miss it.  I’m not looking for a fling, but an Olympian thing.  Someone strong enough to push back when I am half-mad (I never fully get to the whole mad).  Someone who isn’t going to bullshit me about their status and the realities of their world just because they want a taste of the ambrosia that gets flung around like cheap beer at a Steelers game. 

I’m not perfect, God knows.  I can, and have, put up with a lot from people who seemed to get in the door a little too easily with the password "I love you" and then started trashing the place.  I hate playing bouncer in my own heart and soul.  Hate it.  Someone who I can write about their beauty and virtues without having to lie to myself, that when I go back and read the works they inspired, I don’t have to ask "what was I drinking?"

The muse is a sacred thing to me.  It allows me to be who I am.  Without artifice, the vessel of my craft and spirit.  I have made myself Ronin, by choice, and the voice I hear when I speak is diminished as I strive to learn enough about myself and the nature of life that I speak no more blasphemies of the gods of love.

I’m not looking for sympathy.  I don’t need it or even deserve it.  I have been very fortunate in this life to have seen glimpses of beauty and passion and talent of the magnitudes I have seen.  There are those who would say I am being greedy in asking for one more, perhaps one final, run of the Chariot of Apollo across the sky.  If this is greedy of me, then I am greedy, and selfish.

But not dishonest or disloyal to my faith in love, to my unnamed Goddess.  I would rather die for a single, simple truth, than live for a lie. 

Love, romance, sex.  The high of raptured contact.  First kiss.  Parting kiss.  The discovered lie.  The damning truth.  The smell of brimstone.  The smell of jasmine and warm skin.  The spirituality of making love.  The necessity of pain.

Themes.  Themes to be covered in loveaddict, my next book (you’ve seen the cover in my last entry).  What was originally to be a volume of all new poetry, exploring the nature of love and why we are drawn to it, has evolved.  I am not giving details.  I want to surprise you, to please you like an unexpected kiss or a bundle of roses.  I will tell you that the book is a confession, and the titular character is me.  Not a confession of some great evil or crime, but of how my mind and soul work and how I have sought to fill the need for love and to love in my life.

I am still editing at this time, but we are probably looking at around 160-175 works.  Many published previously, elsewhere, in various literary and poetry journals (I don’t keep track of my publication credits, which I find in the ghetto of academic poets is considered a worse sin than plagiarism.  Fuck ‘em.  This is not a game to keep score in, this is my religion, not a dilettante’s hobby).  Many of the poems are new, so new you can smell the afterbirth.  Some are refractions of the past, distillations of the present and visions of an uncertain, but hopeful, future.

There are reflections of the catalog of my muses, from Alabaster to Aubergine.  From the Mad Gypsy to Brigit.  Valkyrie and Goldenheart.  The cats are present, Panther and Leopard, but only there because the Radiant Tiger found virtue in them, spoke of them, and chose to make the words public.  There are new muses, or at least ones you have never met before. 

Soon after the book comes out, I will be removing selected selected earlier volumes of my works from circulation.  Some of my older volumes contain works that, in the filter of time, I have judged disposable.  Just as I have decided certain people are.

The blurbology for this one will be interesting.  I haven’t decided yet who to approach.  Maybe Larry Jaffe?  Some new people.  Som non-writerly types, even.  Many were startled when "Artisan and domestic diva" Michele Beschen, the host of B. Original, blurbed As such…

I do wish to thank the lovely and talented Liza Lorraine for her contribution to this book, in the form of the cover photo.  It is stunning.  If one poem in this volume speaks to one person the passion and evocation of emotion that her photo does to me, I will be pleased.

Now. back to the editing. 

I was only recently made aware of the fact that two of my muses, Selke and Nightblooming, have the same birthday.  Curious.  I mean, what are the odds?

For her birthday, I gave Nightblooming flowers, candy and the volume she requested, the autographed copy of "INVOCATO" that had boomeranged (I suspect it will suffer a grisley fate, but what was I supposed to do with it?  Install it in a museum?).

For Selke’s birthday?  Ah, that would be telling.

I just wrote a cute piece comparing the ebb and flow of my inspirational muses to the stock market, but decided it was insensitive to many, so I deleted it.

Just wanted to let you know, though, that we put some time in on it…pretty interesting stuff, just not for public consumption.  Check my archives when I am gone.

Okay, time for our semi-annual ritual of rumour control. 

Very simple. 

I am not currently engaged, about to get engaged, secretly married to or anything else.  I am still ronin and that’s the current battle plan.

There are women I enjoy the company of, but I’ve learned a valuable lesson:  Even the best intentioned people don’t always know what they want.  That includes me, and the vast majority of women I have known in this life (I extrapolate that most fit the mold).

Yes, I have good friends and those who inspire me.  My most excellent friend Jazz (whom you may also know as nightblooming or Huerta), from whose playful work with the English language I take the word in the title you scratched your head at.  We have known each other for almost a decade, and she has even been the cover of one of my CDs.  We’ve flirted, and I have even used her as a muse in absentia of a primary one being in my life.  And make no mistake, I do find her adorable, and intriguing, she’s a very terrific woman (and tall, she’s sort of a Hispanic version of Brigit).  If the mothership returned tonight and said I could only take one with me, she’d probably be the first number I call…she just probably wouldn’t answer, being out in a mosh pit somewhere.  I’m not kidding.  She’s an accomplished rock bassist and writes some seriously demented poetry. 

There’s Liza, whose photography sometimes shows up here, on williamfdevault.com and the Amomancer blog.  Charming, brilliant, talented and sexy as only a Brazilian fireball can be.  The realities of geography and the chronography makes it extremely unlikely that I will ever fill a role in her life other than a counseling uncle, but I do adore her.  Much the same for Mariya, again a long-distance flirtation with many poetic works sparked by her fearless artistic photography.  But, last time I checked, she had a boyfriend and contrary to the mythology, if a woman tells me (not if the man tells me, as people don’t own people) that she is in a relationship, she is off limits.

For now I am left to my adorisimz (the word Jazz coined for our style of mock fighting with compliments), my memories and several decades of genetically ordained indestructibility.  By the time Shelley was my age he had been decomposing for almost three decades.  Urgh.

Besides, who knows what will be coming at me from an unexpected quarter (gratuitous book plug).  My first serious relationship came out of a chance meeting at an airport that ended with me falling down an escalator.  My first wife, I met while I was engaged to another (the one I fell down the escalator over).  My second wife, I met on an airplane and was dating only women at the time.  And these aren’t the weirdest cases.  I accept the fact that the thunderbolt chooses its own time and place to strike.  I just grit my teeth and hope I don’t disintegrate in the firestorm.

My phone could literally ring right now with a new opportunity or someone of my past yearnings, re-entering the orbit of my life.  When the jolt comes, expect me to seize on with both hands, my toes, teeth and eyelashes, and to write of what it does to me, for good or for ill.  I will welcome such an adventure with open arms and seek to carry it with me the remainder of my days, being faithful and monogamous, and maybe taking my time to give her a book cover.  I’ve put 4-1/2 women on book covers (the Panther, the Leopard, nightblooming, the Goldenheart and Aubergine (looking around) I don’t see any of them hanging around.  Jazz suggests, rather snarkily, that maybe I attract women who are seeking immortality, but not the immortalizer.  Hrm.

So to recap:  Not involved with anyone right now.  The poetic works you are seeing springing anew are being inspired my memories and speculations and the occasional sense of awe at the writings or artwork of someone I feel resonance with.  In the last few years there’s been a few near-misses, and one resounding long-distance collision (is that even possible?), but right now, in my soul of souls, I am in solitude, romantically, and it is not a bad place to be.   I am learning to accept and respect the role of the ronin, the integrity of who I am.

It is uncomplicated. No illusions, no doubts, no trust issues.  I used to get up at ridiculous hours of the morning or stay up half the night to be a human alarm clock or comfort food to the passion du jour.  Now I am more self-contained, more self-aware.  I have found some answers I did not think were knowable.  I have written things I would have not been able to a decade ago.

I have not lost faith in love, in romance, in faith itself.  Don’t worry about me.  I’m just getting started.

An older poem of mine, back before there was air and sunshine and opposable thumbs, was entitled across the stars and lovelost.  It was about the hollow feeling I had after my breakup with Psyche.  It was stark, ragged, jagged and brutal.  And cathartic.

Those were simpler times, the world seemed much less complicated to me, then…and it was.

Now, having made it through five years of elective celibacy (okay, not completely elective, I would have ended it for one right person…but the fates have a sense of humour that even I can laugh about when the wounds begin to heal) I find myself no less fascinated by love and romance and the urge to merge.  I had thought these years would purge me of that surge of adrenaline and testosterone I get when I see or hear or imagine or smell a woman (not taste or feel, mind you, that would be going over a line…).  They haven’t.

My powers of intellect and emotion seem undiminished.  My writing seems as on point, if not more so, than ever.  But I find myself strangely becalmed.  Jazz, the other day, told me that I could and can do anything I want, have anything I want in this life (she went further than that, but let’s keep this sane) and she wondered why I was allowing myself to dwell in the grey.

I told her it is because of the nature of this beast.  Whether by nature or nurture, I need the seed, the inspiration, the muse, to kindle and sustain the fire.  To write the arcane equations that will trigger the mad reaction that will spark the conflagration that becomes the immolation in which I dwell in my purest, surest form.  There are some, as we speak, dancing at the edge of the circle of light the fire I dimly shed at this time sustains, but none have stepped into the light and declared themselves.  As couer rage is a requisite in a lover, I can not go and drag one into the light, they must step of their own accord.

And thus I wait.  Perhaps until the next moment, or next day, or next year or even unto the next life (where there is one who has sworn she’ll be waiting for me, but she had a problem with keeping her word in this life…not counting on it).

Until then, I am once again across the stars, looking for something dimly lit in the soundless vacuum of the space between dreams.

Finally, after much fumfering and threats of jihad, the first two of my books to be made available specifically for the Amazon Kindle, that remarkable eBook reader that is dominating the marketplace, are now available at Amazon.com.

The Compleat Panther Cycles, that darling of the intelligentsia of the digital renaissance, is now available for your Kindle device at a fraction of the tree-killer, massive 700 page volume it normally is.  With all of the poems, forewords, annotations and jaw dropping internal artwork featuring Jillian Ann, it comes in at just (get this) $9.59!!  Amazon retails the hardcopy for $36.00.  That’s almost 75% off!

As such…, last years dynamo of passion unfurled and hurled defiantly into unsympathetic winds, got turned around in record time and is now ready for your paper-free purusal for a mere $6.39, that’s more than half off the cover price!  I actually feel a little cheap at that price, but if they want to sacrifice their margin, I’m good.  The poetry is no less passionate or penetrating or, sadly, ironic. 

In any case, this means I now feel compelled to push on with adding more of my books.  Watch this space for updates.

I was looking at my friends’ list on Facebook and realized I have an awful lot of people who have played roles of significance in my life on my list.  Present and past.  For instance:

• Relatives?  I have all four of my sibs, as well as the unofficial 5th DeVault brother.  6 neices and nephews.  My Mom.  My poetry bro, Larry Jaffee (founder of Poets for Human Rights as well as the writer of the foreword to my book Love Gods of a Forgotten Religion).
•  
• Book and CD  connections?  I three different editors for my books, including the stalwart Jan Innes.  I have the cover and inside illustration model for The Compleat Panther Cycles.  I have the cover model for my CD Nightblooming.
•  
• Muses?  Nightblooming Jasmine (of course), the Butterfly, Suede, The Selke, The Mad Gypsy herself and the older sister to my first real muse, Alabaster.
•  
• Various and Sundry?  My first girlfriend (from the 6th grade!), the person who has done more interviews with me than anyone else (Barb Holmes), my "Teal Protege" and various friends and inspirations responsible for dozens of my works and some significant good in my life, as well as assorted writers, editors, publishers and recording artists (even Billy Vera).  People I might otherwise not have regular contact with.  People hiding in plain sight (yes, some people are not who you might think they are, some don’t know I know who they really are).  People I have sat down to dinner with, read with and written about, as some have written of me, readers, lovers and critics.

I see there’s a lot of good to my Facebook friends.  I think I’ll keep them.  And collect more as people choose to enter into my lifestream.  I enjoy the process and the people I intersect with.

"a flash of night that splits the light, licking the ticking until silence reigns as violence in my veins"

"boxed toxic.  let the qat out of the bag and the arc will sag, haggard and hammered like a young woman beaten down by her collusion with the enemies of her sanity and freedom"

"gossamer filaments/a lightbulb shaped like a spider/I danced mating with, once,/when the dunce’s hat was something to fear/to sear into flesh already branded/too many times to decipher the cybrous fibers/injected invectives played with, layed with/like a manipulation of a dream/a dry dram of powder replacing oils thought essential/but proven no more than shadows/on a tongue stung by the dung dug and drug/into the sky to play constellations with memory."

Hold it, that last one is more than a fragment, let’s try this one write/right.

gossamer filament
a lightbulb shaped like a spider
I danced mating with, once,
when the dunce’s hat was something to fear,
to sear into flesh already branded
too many times to decipher the cybrous fibers
injected invectives played with, layed with
like a manipulation of a dream
a dry dram of powder replacing oils thought essential
but proven no more than shadows
on a tongue stung by the dung dug and drug
into the sky to play constellation with memory

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.

It will do, for now.  Four muses in one poem.  Kinky.  I will think of a title later.

Gnight.

In my spare time (ask anyone who knows me, I define "manic") I have been polishing my poetic inventory. Well, actually my overall writing inventory. Just to see what all I have. Hey, it beats the hell out of reruns of "Two and a Half Men".

My current catalog breaks down thus (as of midnight, August 1, 2008. We all know that I have written about 50 new works since then…deal with it).

• 18,642 poems
• 143 essays
• 82 short stories
• 3 novels in various states of completion
• 3 screenplays in various states of completion

This does not account my general discourse on my various blogs, which numbers int he thousands of entries.

The poetry breaks down, as best I can figure, out of the 18,642

• 285 sonnets
• 46 villanelles
• 22 poems greater than 100 lines

Credited inspiration:

• 2,182 to Abstra (the abstraction muse)
• 740 to The Panther
• 488 to Aubergine (I have gone back to using totem on this one)
• 94 to The Leopard
• 82 to The Selke
• 72 to Brigit
• 55 to The Goldenheart

Some of these numbers are a little rough. I tried not to dwell on anything for too long.

So what does it all mean? I don’t know, but it was an interesting exercise that gives me fodder for internal debate for a while. And don’t think that the numbers mean much. In terms of classic, timeless and quality pieces, I would say that Panther is way down on the list, for instance. I will let history decide which muses were really luses and not just channels for a generic creative spirit needing outlet.