City of Legends

To celebrate several events, but most explicably the 1,000th post that I have made to my pure poetry blog, Amomancer, I have posted the entire 99 poem collection and contents of my forthcoming book "Apokalypsis".  I edited out a few small elements in the dedication and author’s section, to obscure the identity of White Sunday a/k/a The Sunday Girl, as she is not yet ready to go public, but otherwise, it is all there; the Sacraments, Lighthouse, the first 60 of the White Sunday poems, various villanelle, haiku, sonnets and projective poetry of love, lust, desire, affection, despair, pain, sorrow and consummation.

One hell of a ride. 

Here’s the link:  Apokalypsis at amomancer.

Enjoi.

Romantic and erotic poetry with strong religious and mythological allusion and metaphor?  Yes?  Someone call?

I sort of own the patent on that, no?  And when you ignore the jungle cats, garden vegetables and precious stones, those elements play a role in the mythology of my poetry.  Not just to anchor the vision, but because there is resonance in them, for me, with the muses who inspire me.

Of late, I have turned my eyes to the muse I call "White Sunday".  I can’t tell you why I call her that.  Not because it is some secret I am keeping, but because it is a secret kept even from me.  I can tell you what I know…

About a year ago I wrote a handful of poems entitled "White Sunday".  They were pretty good, even by my hypercritical standards.  The overarching metaphor and allusion was "White Sundey", which some call Whitsunday, which is also known as Pentecost, the day upon which the disciples of Jesus received the Holy Spirit and the evangelism of the early Christian Church truly began.  I was compelled to write these poems that melded the religious fervor and transformation of Pentecost with the realization of love and passion for a woman.  The problem was, I had no idea who she was. 

Fast forward about a year, and I am flipping through my works and something about one of the poems in that set struck me, resonating with the reality of a poem I had read, written by a writer acquaintance of mine.  I looked it up, I looked her up (she has a website) and was suddenly aware of how much the writings and photographs (she is also a photographer) I had enountered, a little more than a year ago, had been the Genesis of the "White Sunday" poems.

I approached her about this, and included not only links to the works, but also a few newer poems she had inspired.  She was honored, and flattered (or at least she said so, but I have not yet reached that point where I start out disbelieving people, no matter how many times I have found hollow promise in the words of a woman).  Thus inspired, I wrote more.  More.  More.

The "White Sunday" poems themselves number 16 at this writing, as well as a half dozen others that are dedicated to her, but not officially of the series.  Free verse and villanelles, gently romantic and fervently erotic by turns, but undeniably inspired and of sound quality.  I am delighted to have found a new muse.  And while she is not involved with me as a lover, that does not preclude my feeling strong emotion, as we all know I can feel at range. 

For now I am content that she has assented to be my muse and seems to like at least some of the works (I do not delude myself that she reads them all or delights in them all, most people find my work strong spirits, and moreso the muses!).  I am pleased such that I have made preparations to weave them into my next book "Apokalypsis".

Many, most, have been posted to my Amomancer blog.  All have been posted to my pages at www.deviantart.com.  If you have a moment…I would suggest you take the time to read at least one or two.

The opening line to my poem Horizon, which has its own complex mythology that even I do not fully understand, is the title of this blog entry.

The poem celebrates horizons, explorations, the brave who dare "look to the horizon with unclouded eyes".  But at the same moment, it is unflinching in expressing despair, pain, loss, the price of exploration.  It speaks of living on, filling one’s belly with "morsels and mold".

To follow a path, one must walk it.  Every day.  Never straying far.  To others the very path you walk may be invisible, or incomprehensible, even dangerous.  You keep walking.  Running, when you tire, to fight the entropy death of will and vision.  I don’t expect applause, or sympathy, and certainly not empathy from those who notice my path.  I have come to understand that, next to declarations of "soul mates" or "soul twins" the too-easily said "I understand" has become the tool of the predatory or parasitic co-dependent.  I’ve been guilty of the abuse of it, as well (never said I was perfect).

This morning I changed my status on Facebook to "It’s complicated", which immediately set my status to "In a relationship, but it’s complicated".  I received a few notes mere moments after the change, probing for information about my new lady.  There isn’t one.  It’s my lifelong companion, my muse, who sometimes has been very cross with me for taking mistresses in her place.  And I have usually suffered for it, in one form or another.

Of the nine classic Greek muses, you would expect mine to be Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, or even Calliope, that of epic poetry, but I suspect (knowing my addiction to long and agile legs) that is Terpsichore, the muse of the dance.  Perhaps.  That is certainly a topic worth a few term papers and speculations by readers. 

But I am, at this time, acknowledging her, my muse.  She has taken many forms, and I have mistaken more than one person for her in my day.  Beyond my horizon, she is there.  And with me, every day, even when I cannot see her or hear her voice.  Any other woman who enters my life must, as so many have discovered too late, accept her as the first and most central relationship to my heart.

My brain aches.  Not like a headache, but in that pulled-muscle way that I experience when I am pushing hard to discover a new truth, integrate great epiphanies or figure out what a lover wants for Christmas.

If poetry is my religion, that is to say the means by which I worship the Almighty, then what role do the muses play in the belief system?  Yeah, to most that’s right up there with angels doing the hokey-pokey on the head of a pin, or some pinhead of some sort, but to me that’s a serious question, a tough nut to crack and a source of great distraction.

Could it be said that all muses are revelations, even prophets, sometimes even unaware of their influence, but that the one true muse would be the equivalent of a Messiah?  Yes.  Hold it.  Have to think about this. 

The partial revelations that were Alabaster.  Psyche.  Valkyrie.  Arachne.  Dawn.  Panther.  The Goldenheart.  Selke.  Brigit.  Angel.  The Mad Gypsy.  Leopard.  Nightblooming.  Aubergine.  And all the fits and sparks of light in night skies that often only I alone can see.  The debris of a mystery built on a history worn to the bone.  Unatoned atonality.  The finality of beginnings.  The start of a heart that, for now, has no sign of life, no spark of purpose.

See?  I told you it gets crazy in there.  In here.  Somewhere…over the rainbow.  Hmmph.

Behold the lilies of the field.  They toil not, neither do they spin, but they are glorified in the words of poets purely for the awe they inspire in us and the love we feel, regardless of their own virtues and merits.

It always happens, the phoenix rises and all that it was and is becomes a beautiful mythology.

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. 

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.

loveaddict, the new book I am working on, is driving me crazy.  It’s tough to touch all those highly-charge poles of light and legerdemain and not feel something.  Then I have to write about the feelings invoked.  The wiring is an issue.

A good friend of mine the other day asked why I don’t write more, publish more and take over the world (her words, not mine).  I explained to her that it doesn’t work that way, at least not for me.  I got very burned out on the competitive nature of the publishing game, long ago.  I am content in my level of literary immortality.  I wouldn’t mind a best seller or ten to make things a little cushier, but I’m not in it for the money.

I do make this promise, to those of you frustrated by my low-key approach to my publicity:  I will, sometime in the next several months, put up a an effort to give one or more of my books, CDs or other projects a running leap into the world.  I’ll wire it up, fire it up and turn it loose with all deserving fanfare and rockets red glare and see how the world reacts.

I just have one element missing:  The focus.  I need still to find someone I can bind my creativity to.  A master, if you will (actually more the mistress, if you know what I mean), to inspire and press me, and to give me an anchor between my creative and spiritual sides.  There is at least one good candidate out there, slowly, circumspectly orbiting me, seeing if I am truly interested in what she has to offer…

A new muse.  For now, as cold as gold left too long on the artisan’s bench, shiny and seductive. 

It has been coming in flickers and flashes (I know my creative personality all too well).  The desire to write something blood-fusion-hot in the way of some erotic poetry, to breathe out the solferino flames of the dragon.  There’s just one problem: No current muse.

Oh, yes, I could link to a memory and write something fiercely carnal and heated, that would melt keyboards and ignite screens.  That people would use to get laid.

But I’m over writing about the past in the present.  At least from that aspect.  Remembering a meal is not very nutritious.  And, make no mistake, I am hungry.  To the point of mad ferality. 

I could write of Abstra, the muse of the abstract lover.  But that would be disingenuous.  And, to be honest, to me, a bit boring.  I am considering retiring her.

I could write it of any of the lovely ladies who inhabit this constellation of my life, as friends and collaborators.  But that would elevate her to a place where she would rapidly become uncomfortable (as I know women, for the most part, regardless of what they say, want to control the temperature in the room) and off-balance.  Besides, it would be, at least in some vectors, a lie. While I may think of someone in that way (no names, please) I am doing my best to save the heat, the fire, the thermonuclear glory, for someone special, someone who might stick around and share their life.  You know, someone who wants more than a remote or weekend fling with verbal snapshots to remember in their old age.

I guess, for all the speculation to the contrary, I am sort of the anti-Joe Gideon.  I’m not looking for tourists in my love life, you know, the kind of person who has read the brochure and wants to know what it is like to dance with the man who has danced with the legends on the cliffs.  I want someone who is serious about moving in, taking up residence and giving me a reason to move the furniture around a bit. 

For all my chaos, my native state is as a domesticated animal.  Never been otherwise.  Stupid, on more than one occasion.  Gullible?  Certainly. 

I think I will just keep the fire in the belly of the dragon until it is the right time to breathe it out again.  Trust me, it’ll keep and when it does finally have cause to be released, you’ll know it.

And so will she.

In business, you often want to have a five-year plan for where you want to go.  It doesn’t have to be too detailed, but it helps to know what your plan is, and what you think you can do.  A yardstick and a map.

In interviews I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it asked "Where do you see yourself in five years?".  I remember back in the sixties hearing Davy Jones of the Monkees reply that he was going to make a million dollars in five years then retire.  His rationale was that if he had a million dollars he could retire, so why not, and if he hadn’t made a million dollars in five years he was in the wrong line of business.  Interesting notion.

Over the last five years I have won more than lost.  Given up a few bad habits, picked up a few new ones.  Made friend, made enemies, made sense more often than not, and made progress, if not as swiftly as I had hoped in some areas, at least measurable progress.

So where to in the next five years.  It gets more interesting now.  I am of an age where the actuarial tables start snatching some contemporaries.  Old friends, strangers, celebrities.  I note when someone in my age demographic drops over with no advance warning (oh, they probably had an idea but didn’t think it was worthy telling their doctor about the chest pains and shortness of breath every time they had to get out of a chair, or that strange growth on the back of their neck).

So, I fight now not only my own demons, and the fates, I fight the clock.  I promised a young woman just last year that I would last another 50 years or so.  She didn’t believe me.  But with the genetics I have been fortunate enough to stumble into through no virtue of my own, if I take a little better care of myself I am pretty much guaranteed, short of a suicidally heroic gesture on my part, or a falling anvil, or a literary critic or misinformed romantic rival who knows to load silver bullets dipped in Holy Water and shoot for the head, to bury most of the people I have loved in this life.  Some I have already lost, some I have lost track of and may already be spoken of in the past tense.  All will sap my soul with their passing, even the ones who have chosen to speak poorly of me after the fact.

Five years from now, though.  I will be older.  Most likely a touch thinner, perhaps even more vigorous (paradoxically), as I have started taken my health more seriously and have largely gotten over the ravages of the past year. 

I shall probably be in what at least seems to be a stable relationship.  I would like to have one that lasts out most of the remaining years.  Something to serve as my anchor to this life and as inspiration for my writings.  I’m not looking for another flash in the pan setup where flowers and platitudes and pop-psychology is tossed about as substitute for real and earnest thought and passion.

There are moments I catch myself thinking of Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing when he is describing his perfect woman in Act II, Scene III:

One woman is beautiful, yet I’m well; another is wise, yet I’m well; another virtuous, yet I’m well.  Only when all graces are in one woman will one woman come into my heart.  She’ll have to be rich, that’s certain; and wise, or I’ll have none; virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen to her level; beautiful, or I’ll never even look at her; mild, or she’ll come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; a good speaker, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be…  of whatever color it pleases God.

I’m not that arrogant, to presume so many prerequisites.  Oh, I have my standards, but since every woman I have ever fallen in love with violates at least one (and in several cases, many) of the standards, they are little more than discussion points.

A young woman the other day and I discussed the notion of "chemistry".  It is certain that there have been and are certain woman in this life who can make me do a double-take worthy of a Tex Avery cartoon character.  Usually not on their physical attributes, but on a certain aspect of the way they carry themselves, or speak.  I think I am attracted to women who have the capacity to surprise me, to break the mold, to confirm in my mind and heart and soul that women are, indeed, the ascendant gender, superior to the male in all but brute force. But, I digress.  I often do when I speak of women and of love. Five years.  From now.  Here’s 8 predictions:

1. I shall be alive and on good terms with my children.
2. I shall have broken my boycott on funerals to attend, and probably speak at ,one or two.
3. I shall be involved with a woman who is creative, intelligent and inspiring.  People close to me will consider the relationship doomed, and will still be considering the same relationship doomed ten years from now, perhaps, if I am fortunate, 20 years from now.
4. I will still be straddling the fence between author and recording artist.  At least one of my books will be highly controversial.  I predict 3-5 books in the next five years, maybe about the same CDs.
5. I will be living on the West Coast, but be very mobile.  I will be comfortable and stable financially, but not wealthy
6. I will be a grandfather.
7. I will have had no major surgeries but at least one minor one.
8. I will have spoken, since this writing, at least once, with all surviving major muses of my works.

There, that’s a good list.  Let’s see how I do over the next half of a decade.

There’s a part of me that thinks the cover to loveaddict should be simple, spare and direct, perhaps nothing more than the compound word, the first part in red, the second in black, on an all-white cover.

Another part of me thinks I should use my own face, such as it is (my Mother has even disavowed it, of late) to emphasize the confessional tone.

And a third notion involves a cover made up of one or more images of some young lovely, exemplifying love, or lovers, or Aphrodite, or past lovers…

But a new idea spark just moments ago.  An idea I will probably love passionately for a few minutes, hours or days, then see the fallacy of my affection for it and go with a previous notion, or a new one.

Break the cover frame into sections.  It could be done very comic-book-panel or very chaotic.  Into each panel embed a photo of, not a lover or an avatar of a lover, but a photo or illustration of the totem that represents them, for instance:

• A Valkyrie
• A leopard
• A panther
• A flame-haired goddess
• The skin of an eggplant
• A woman glowing with electric-blue static
• A will-o-wisp
• A half-seal, half-woman
• An alabaster statue of a woman
• A jasmine blossom
• A dancer
• A heart made of gold
• An albino fox
• A pair of ballet shoes
• The Golden Gate of Kiev
• An angel
• A spider in its web
• The sun rising
• A gypsy dancer
• A butterfly
• A patch of suede
• A faerie

I didn’t realize, until I started the list, how long it would be…and it isn’t complete.  I better shut up now and get back to my consideration.