City of Legends

writing with a revived gusto…a full cycle this morning (check it out on deviantart.com or at my Amomancer blog.

Just wrote one of the most kick-ass sonnets I will ever write ("Unfulfilled Wish for Intimacy") and am right now bouncing through the internet on multiple sites while the cats are diving for cover as I play "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" at 11…"Moonage Daydream" really works for me right now.

I have sublimated some negativity into a purified emotional stream and am right now playing alchemist with my soul and heart.

Today my father turns 87.  He is in good health and I am happy is is strong and well and in my life.  I am blessed.  He is a good man.

As I write I am sitting here with my headphone son, bombarding my soul with the most gut-wrenching songs I know.  Not to punish myself, but to test the fibers.  In case you have been living in a hermetically-sealed mason jaw on Funk & Wagnall’s back porch for the last several weeks, I gave my heart.  Vegas oddsmakers are disappointed, as they had me as a 3:2 to never say "I love you" to a woman again.  I love it when I confound my critics.  I think I’ve made a career of it, and a legacy.  Always bet on red.

No, people, I will stop giving my heart permanently when I am dead.  And maybe not even then, I have hope of an afterlife.  I may fall and get bloodied, but I am resolute.  I have every hope this will not be necessary to test, again, this one, this "Sunday Girl" is extraordinary. 

But I am sitting here listening to the likes of Bush’s "Glycerine", Art Garfunkle’s "All I Know" and Neil Young’s prophetic "Heart of Gold".  Glutton for punishment?  Nah, just sparring with my soul.  My last two significant relationships bloodied me pretty badly.  I have to get tough, strong, fast and resilient.  I don’t plan to fall or fail, or to see this one slip away and crumble to dust, but that, in the end is an exercise of her free will and beyond my ethical boundaries to control.  Yes, I have shown an ability to influence people with my words, but to usurp free will?  No!

I have updated my Amomancer blog with more of the White Sunday works…I am considering a totem shift (yes, I know I foreswore the totems during the Aubergine era, but we all saw how well that went).  I am considering (furtive glances to the side) changing her totem from "The Sunday Girl" or "White Sunday" to…Apokalypsis.  There’s a couple of very valid reasons to do so.  I’m thinking about it.  Suggestions?  Ideas?  Bribes?

Had a good planning session with my occasional partner-in-crime, the Mountain Poet himself, Dan McTaggart.  I wanted a sounding board for the umpteen projects I had buried myself in deadlines for.  He was, as always, helpful and wise.

I am moving the launch of renaissancefive, the magazine, to September 1, 2010.

I am moving my next book, Apokalypsis, to sometime in October.  You’ll find out why later.  trust me, it is soooooo much better this way.

And if you have no yet got on the "White Sunday" train I suggest you bop over to the Amomancer blog, or even to my works on DeviantArt.com an see what the huzzah is about!

I am seeing some of my best works, ever. 

I will fill in everyone on the second part of this entry’s title later…special thanks to Mark Petrulo for that tale.

The first part of the title involves an email I got just today from a reader in the Netherlands (no, not the Nether Regions or the Nefarious Zone) who had encountered a musical composition last Spring in the Netherlands and had opportunity to meet the performer and asked him about some lyrics he particularly enjoyed. 

He was told they were lines from a poem, but the performer (whose name I do not know yet) declined to name the poet.  The reader (whom I will identify as "Marcel" as that is how they identified themself) set out to track down the source, eventually finding out from a third party that it was from a poem of mine.  Unfortunately, no one seemed to be sure which poem (hey, over 18,000 poems in my catalog, it gets complicated).  So, Marcel wrote to me asking me to identify the lyric.

The piece I was given is actually two different sections from my poem "the philosophy of dreams", which you can read at the Amomancer site:  http://amomancer.blogspot.com/2007/05/philosophy-of-dreams.html and for which archive.org keeps a recording of my reading it in a virtual beatnik cafe.

So, there tis, the mystery lyrics in Netherlands are solved.  I have asked Marcel to tell me the name of the artist and where I might find an audio of the performance.  I will keep you informed…

Now, about the red Tae Kwan Do t-shirt…

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. 

Made a commitment to myself this morning, based on how much energy I seem to have (too much, actually, which can be annoying).  I promise you, dear readers, to have the most manic weekend of my online life (that’s a pretty damn high bar if you know my last 15 years online).

Watch here, on Twitter, at blip.fm, the Amomancer blog, Facebook, and everywhere else I manifest…we are going for a ride.

Strap in.  (yes, in.  No, I said in…why must you always read something dirty into everything I say?)

The week started unusual.  Someone from my past re-emerged.  A good someone.  Not a footnote someone, a chapter (or two) person.  Red hair.  Very tall.  Great kisser.  I digress.

Received an invite from an old friend to go to the Springsteen concert.  Decided not to.  I love the Boss, and all, but the timing was wrong and, dunno, just not what struck me in the moment.  I am, however, planning to take my sons to an Aerosmith & ZZ Top concert this summer.  They have never been to a concert.  They’re to be 16 in July.  This will be interesting.

Got a reverse query today from a small, small, small press editor.  Wants to do a volume of just my Goldenheart cycles.  Intriguing, but I have to think about it.  I want to hear his vision. 

Leapt a few cliffs in the last few hours.  Getting the power, the adrenaline, back.  The testosterone follows.  Wrote like a hurricane the other morning…loaded about ten poems onto the Amomancer blog, with future dates so they’ll automatically pop over the next week and a half without my having to remember to feed the readers.

Strange dream last night.  Okay, not strange.  Nice to know I still get dreams like that.

An unusual week.

While the Amomancer blog is being hammered by the White Sunday works, I thought I’d bring a poem straight here.  It came off of reading through a massive folder I have that contains the emails, the letters (or epistles) between myself and a woman whom I shared a relationship with.  The words, I believe, were true in the frame she spoke them, my words, of course, remain true…but the truth is, all faiths fail…

thistling epistles

the barren boughs are what the casual observer
would see, in this tree, planted then recanted
like the meal you thought better of later.
the vines wend their way up the mighty trunk
to choke the life from it, each barb and brier
seeking to steal that which beauty would inspire
and bring down the living arms that reached to God
in gratitude for the Spring and the harvest
that never came. and were it not for the epistles
of the dreamers who once climbed in its embrace,
the beauty and the majesty of this tree would be lost.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.

I have a half dozen tracks I am working on right now for my CD TRUTH, and think, maybe, I have stumbled and fallen into sunshine in my search for the showstopper number.

It is the recitation and musical adaptation of the poem "faith healer", which you can read over at the Amomancer blog by clocking on the title.

The poem has a complex history and weaves romanticism, eroticism and mysticism into a single piece, predicating the notion that intimacy can be a powerful healing force (which explains why I am, over the last few years, slowly falling apart. Ha!). It takes elements of my life and experience stretching back decades, and even contemporary (my history with women who are survivors of abuse plays into my sense of affection as an healing agent).

But, in any case, we shall see if it finishes as well as it seems to be. I need to do some added voice on it and my throat is still putting up a fight.

Those of you who frequent my Amomancer poetry blog have already noted the change to a flesh and red colour scheme in the last 24 hours. My idea, my design. Mine alone.

I am going for a conspiracy of one.

I have found that letting others do certain tasks for me is, in the long run, a zero-win proposition, as everyone stumbles and since it is unlikely that both shall stumble at the exact same moment, a partnership with anyone doubles the opportunity for issues.

I am going for a conspiracy of one.

This weekend I am going to try and fix some longstanding issues with this blog and a few of my social networking outlets, doing what I have to do to resolve, absolve and just plain solve the issues in the tissues.

I am going for a conspiracy of one.

By weekend’s end, I hope to have doubled the level, if not complete, the placement of all the soundfiles from my CDs on the williamfdevault.com site, expanded the art gallery there (including creating some specialized galleries of some special artists and models) and posted a new podcast.

I am going for a conspiracy of one.

That’s not to say that I am not going to work with key friends, lovers, peers and powers in the future, just that I have rediscovered the need to control a larger defined zone of interpretation of my work and person.

I am a conspiracy of one.

for what it is worth, for what there is…I have finished my exile.  Today, November 1st, I am back in this world. 

I apologize to you who worried needlessly, as to my health and safety.  I am fine, and strong and well.  I just needed a time to walk paths I would not normally, to breathe the ether.  I have filled my lungs with my native atmosphere and now dive back into the world through which I must swim.

Later today, early tomorrow, at latest, we will begin posting the new CD "truth" to williamfdevault.com

I am announcing that I have pivoted to reality and will be casting my vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday.  I still wish it was Hillary Clinton I was voting for, but the decision of the McCain campaign to select so odious a running mate as Sarah Palin has driven me to take action for the survival of my country and the freedoms we enjoy.

New book?  Sooner than you might expect.

To all of you who have regularly visited the Amomancer blog and kept it alive and well, I thank you.  Your devotion is touching.

I do need to clean up the feeds and referral/subscription subprocesses, they were vandalized in my absence.  Trust, like love, is just word until made manifest in action.  I live, I learn, I grow and evolve.  I am stronger and smarter than I was not so long ago.

Barbara, again thanks for the interview and the concern.  Mariya, for the inspiration.  Liza, for the understanding.  Jazz, the heat.  Sarah, the vision.  Robert, the trust.  Pam, the consistency and strength.  Elric and Dante, the clarifying joy.  Peri, for being my crucible lens.  And to God, for all these things, and all there is.

We still have, by all rational estimates, a few decades to do what is entrusted to us.  Time for dreams and the dreamers.