City of Legends

sorry for posting so late, but got busy (unbelievably busy) and yet, have some news to report.  I have been hammering down on the next book, loveaddict, and the next CD, blister.

As a kindness, here’s a link to a lyric from blister, entitled "into the grey".  Enjoi.

I’m getting feedback from all my old friends who have the couer rage to tell me who I should be involved with.  Let me just say that self-nominations are not out of the question, but use common sense.  I have enough husbands and ex-husbands mad at me over the years.

Huerta has suggested I need to get involved with a "young and dumb hottie", preferably of Asian origin (I couldn’t help but think of "Shanghai Lil" from Rod Stewart’s "Every Picture Tells a Story") with the priviso she needs to be someone who can get me into media-worthy mischief.  I think some people are missing that aspect of my life…but before I tip my hat and hand…

Back to the recording sessions. 

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.

White as illusions, cast to shade scarlet and crimson and the black of the human heart
in better lights, transcendent nights where the perfectability of a kiss becomes a sexorcism
that banishes demons of clay and brass, glass spiders in graven images imagined
to be more than they were less of, more than what they were, and of a substance hammered
by the artisans who knew well their craft as they laughed at their own cunning, running
rings around Saturn and laying myth to the Achilles Heel of the lost worshipers of polytheism.
A communion of stones and water, bones that slaughter even after the flesh fails
and the evangelist sails for a purer night than offered as sacred sacrifice to fallen idols.
How long can you pray to the failed, the scrailed words on tablets of earth and bone,
the deeper demons remain and the pain is inhuman, put aside for a time to come.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.  With thanks to Jazz for her inspiration.

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.

Just long enough to say

Happy Birthday, Jazz.

Now finish the damn manuscript.

My true love gave to me…

9 perfect proteges…

Thanks to the Jazzy one herself, my prized and pretty protege who sometimes goes by the name "Nightblooming", for her contribution to this day.

Still not 1,000 percent recovered from my bout of RSV, but coming back gradually. Everything tastes like wet paper towels. Mild cough, congestion. Only one more airline leg to go (yay!).

Of course, thanks to the weather and schedules, I will have to hang out here at JFK airport in New York for the next nine hours (already been here almost three) as flights are being canceled due to the weather across the Northeastern United States (snow and freezing rain). Imagine! Snow and ice in December. So rare that there are no emergency plans for it and everyone has to panic when it happens.

I got to spend some quality time with myself, working on various projects, as I lay in my hotel room beds in Salt Lake City and Tooele (pronounced "two-willa") in Utah. We’ll see if I have the energy curve to work on them in the long run. Time will tell.

Almost completely done with my Christmas shopping, just have one or two more things to buy and those will have to wait until at least tomorrow, as I refuse to haul items on the plane that would not fit in my car. Special thanks to Jet Blue for the extra legroom, the inflight television and their new terminal at JFK that includes free wireless. Special special thanks to Jazz for the banter when I was feeling badly and very extra special thanks to Liza for giving me some very good thoughts and inspiration.

Show of hands: How many people think I should hang up the self-flagellation for now and get something done? Yeah, me, too.

Much love to all. Work to be done. Where did I leave the blanket they found in my spaceship when I crashed to Earth? I need it.

Yesterday through this morning has had its share of strangeness, pleasant strangeness.

I had a rare moment of quiet.

I reconnected with my muse "The Faerie". She is well and things are going good in her life. She is the kind of person who could fall through Hell and come out the other side with just a nice tan. She is currently pregnant with her first child and really embracing the experience.

A reader took up my call for a Church of Poetry, which I have always been just waiting for others to hear the call to.

Jazz was communicative, which is sometimes a rare thing. There is such beauty in her darkness, a beauty that she, immersed in it, cannot appreciate. I try to help her to get her arms around that. Even though she has clearly indicated there is no interest on her part in me, I still would like to see her grow as an artist and writer and find her way in this world, which is not always kind to truly creative and sensitive people.

I had a very good engineering session on the new CD.

All in all, a good day.