Relapse; Sonnet: Not Grief

This is a picture of my daughters and I, from left: Rachel, Sarah, (Papa), and Keturah. I only post this so one can visualize them and perhaps better understand, below, why I stressed myself out so much to see them all in a week, though they are divided by long distances.





Not Grief

Here I repeat myself, relapsed again.
My heart is broken, my limp limbs are lead.
My skull’s a rotten melon. I seek the dead
Whom I imagine are beyond such pain.
But who’s to know? The strangled spirit flies
Out in the ether, desperately alone—
Or joined by friends? Or by old enemies scorned?
Jesus came back but didn’t explain the skies.
I know I am not much. I know my tears
Come at eleven o’clock. I hide them well.
No need for my deaf wife to hear my bell
That cracks and tolls, rehearsing its arrears
To God and man inside a third-rate poem;
Depression is not grief. I have no home.


Before my relapse I knew better, even though I was feeling better. First I had been taking a mild dose of a pain medication from which, when I withdraw, I often lapse into depression. I was taking only half my usual dose and tapered off gently. Still the false endorphins it fed my brain were not replaced quickly enough to arrest a downward spiral.

Meanwhile, while Kathleen went to N.Y. to visit her mother, I drove some 1700 miles to see all three of my daughters and my grandson. My eldest daughter was depressed and in need of my help; my second daughter was in her first long-term relationship and I had yet to meet her beau; and my youngest had just turned 18 and I wanted to give her a gift and take her to dinner. While driving south to LA from the Sacramento area my crying spells returned. Throughout the trip I allowed no one to see that side of me. I refused to be depressed and acted normally. Even today, when the tears hit, I held them back until Kathleen went upstairs.

Complicating these facts was also a mild viral infection mainly expressed in donations to the plumbing.

So:

1) Stressful trip, much too much to take on in my fragile condition, though justified by my daughters’ needs, I thought.

2) Playing with the fire of pain medication, simply inexcusable—though when your mood improves, as mine had, you think you can risk things you shouldn’t.

3) A viral infection, which, though mild, can often re-awaken depression.

The overconfidence of euthymia, or normal mood, thus effectively threw me back into depression. Still there’s some anger about the recurrence, and the attitude that “I refuse to be depressed” seems of some utility because I am not as deep down as I could be. Anger is much better than sorrow in overcoming depression.

Naturally, my relapse interrupts my ambition to speak about poetry more broadly. And having had seven rejections in a row, including contests in which I did not even place, doesn’t help my opinion of my art. To be fair, my art is not best represented by the formal poems I write here as an act of sanity, but by free verse pieces you can find throughout the net.


At two kilorats (-2 on a scale of -10 to +10),

Thine,

CE

Inductive Poem

I'm on the road with little opportunity to connect, and I mean to offer examples of poetry other than my own to illustrate the principles of inductive and deductive poetry, but I have no poetic library with me on the road. It so happened that today, staying at my daughter's, I saw a scene which inspired an inductive poem.

Inductive poems are often "found poems" in the larger sense, not confined to words found in a paper or book and rearranged, but built from a scene actually experienced that lends itself to poetic treatment--though not to the extent that Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is developed, though strictly one must admit that ode to be an inductive poem, since it was inspired by the Elgin Marbles.

Anyway, here's my poem:


A Touch

A old man in a brown cardigan
held a black Chow by a chain leash
beside the chain-link fence
where children thronged,
reaching their small fingers
like the white flames of stars
through the open diamonds
of the woven steel, crowding
arms on shoulders, shoulders on backs,
chests pressed against the fence,
clamoring for a touch of fur,
the feel of a living thing
behind no barrier
but not beyond its chain.


Thanks for reading, and when I return from my trip around Feb. 1 I'll be able to write more about my new dichotomy for poetry, especially how inductive poetry seems to be in the ascent right now, whereas during the Restoration it was deductive poetry that ruled (Pope, Dryden). I also mean to visit and comment on my favorite poet-bloggers when I come back. Time is restricted at this library near Sacramento.

Oh, and my mood remains improved, glory be to God and new medications!


Thine,

CE

Examples: Inductive and Deductive

Got my computer back but little time to blog as I will be leaving on a week's trip. Before I do, here are two poems of mine that exemplify the inductive and deductive methods of composition.


Inductive:


At the Aquarium of the Pacific

I saw a brilliant angelfish whose tail
and fins shimmered yellow until it turned
and silver spread like an undercoat of fur
when stroked against the nap, across its scales.
Black as caviar and rimmed with gold,
its eyes, though flat as dimes, looked deep as wells.
The clownfish cruising by above the shells,
its idiotic smile painted bold,
passed disinterested as if it’d seen
it all before. Maybe. But I've heard
fish see only black-and-white, so why
this purple puffer and iridescent green
parrot fish-- and for whom? It's absurd
to credit chance. Either for us or for the light



Deductive:


On the Anthropic Principle

Here at the spoke-ends of our galaxy
it is easy to forget the central axle
moving insensibly slow, still
the silvery-white dispersion of stars
soothes randomly until we impose a pattern,
like the Magi, like the Greeks.

And despite the most accurate of calendars,
dawn remains a wager until the great lion of the sun
peers over the plains with a growl of heat
and the day blooms and withers toward the violet hour
where even wise men arrive as strangers
because the arrangement is never the same.

As the latest layer of bones,
can we ever appreciate how far
the swan's neck stretched to uphold the head,
the spider's strand thinned without snapping?
Do we recall the dark alternatives dodged,
any of which could unmake us?
Always there were detours
where the river never creased the rock
that never rose from the sea
that never spawned a single fossil.

When light illuminates the Grand Canyon
in winter's slant at sundown,
the stripes of ages burn
with every visible color.
What is the color of a radio wave?
Only a man asks that.

Brief Note

I have five minutes left on a cafe computer. I will continue my discussion of inductive and deductive poetry when my computer is repaired. For now, I encourage any interested to look at Frost. He does both kinds well, but I think his inductive work better. A favorite of mine is "Spring Pools." "The Oven Bird," another good poem, is deductive mainly. Frost is a nice place to start in showing examples.

Gotta sign off. Will be back soon! Mood definitely improved.

Thine,

CE

Deductive vs. Inductive Poetry II

My nascent thought posted last night regarding inductive vs. deductive poetry needs some fleshing out. First, I did not give any examples of inductive poets. William Carlos Williams has to lead the pack, with Gary Snyder, Frank O'Hara, Charles Bukowski, Wordsworth to some extent; Robert Lowell late in his career (Life Sketches), and from what I've read of Franz Wright I might include him, and certainly the entire canon of Chinese poetry, where emotion is provoked by events or surroundings. That is, events and surroundings are not used to support an emotion; the emotion arises from them.

Keats was a deductive poet. We should not be fooled by his "Ode to a Grecian Urn," where he is not responding to an experience so much as transmogrifying an icon. "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "Lamia" are more typical--poems organized around a legend or narrative, not in response to experience.

Hopkins tried to get at nature through "inscape," but even so his work is so doused in Christianity that he cannot be considered inductive.

Basically, confining ourselves to the west, deductive poetry ruled until the twentieth century. Donne and Milton and Jonson were all deductive, so was Herbert. Sir Walter Scott epitomizes the deductive poet as he strives to communicate romances in verse. Ginsberg is an odd duck; "In a California Supermarket" is certainly an inductive poem, though a paean to Whitman; but Ginsberg is best known for his deductive work, as in "Howl," where images are used to support his emotion, that emotion not being a response to immediate experience, but to years of psychic pain.

Whitman is another odd duck; he seems to be writing inductive poetry, reacting to nature and man, until he assumes that mystic voice where he merges with all, indeed, becomes all. So he is inductive and deductive, because of the strong influence of Transcendentalism throughout his work.

Pound championed Eastern verse in his youth and wrote some inductive poetry, but his Cantos are primarily deductive, where his substance becomes almost preachy at times (not to mention disconnected).

In summary, then, like rhyme, deductive poetry ruled poetry in English until the late twentieth century, with Williams and Lowell as pioneers and Snyder and the rest following behind. What I read in current literary journals strikes me as 90% inductive. Nowadays inductive poetry is expected by teachers of creative writing; "That's not real," they may say; "That doesn't ring true;" or, "Have you ever actually seen an otter? Then you have no business writing about one."

I satirized this view in my poem, "At the Workshop."

Anyway, I'll continue to flesh out this thought until I can cobble an essay out of it. I've never written an essay this way, except for the interlocutions of my dear wife. But here in a blog format anyone can help me, provide further examples, or simply tell me I'm full of shit--which, of course, I am. But just because my opinions may stink doesn't necessarily make them untrue. ;-}

Thine,

CE

Two Kinds of Poetry: Deductive vs. Inductive

I recently opined that there were only two divisions in post-modern poetry, Beatniks vs. Academics. There is another division that has occurred to me, which I think much more important, since it stretches across ages.

Deductive Poetry originates from within, based on internal projections on the page, imagined scenarios, monologues of imagination, twisting facts and experience to accord with its production. Shakespeare subjugates poetry to character, for instance; Coleridge makes up "The Rime" internally and uses his experience only to fill it out; Eliot, for the most part, tries to establish a stand from which all else is gradually deduced; Strand, as well, creates an internal world of imagination for which the outer world is only employed to propel the poem; and I, for the most part, also confess to being an deductive poet. This means that the poet does not merely respond to reality, but establishes his own reality about which he arranges images and scenes of the world as ornaments, but not for definition.

Inductive Poetry rules the present age, and is based on real experiences recited in poetic form, whether pigeons resting on a statue or the experience of nearly being run over by a taxi. Inductive poetry builds from experience towards an emotional conclusion. It does not establish an imaginative subject to be enlarged, rather submits itself to an experience to be described. Hence it inducts a poem from experience instead of using experience to support a subject determined by the poet's internal projection.

I do not claim one form is better than the other; clearly, the inductive poem rules the art today, and the deductive poem is in decline, often dismissed as rhetoric, as not having "the juice of the apple in your teeth."

Are you a deductive or inductive poet? Certainly I have written both types; my first book of poems is more inductive than deductive; yet I feel this is a dichotomy I have never read about and now seems obvious.

In this sketch my generalities are insufficient for the subject, why I naturally welcome comments on the idea.


Thine,

CE

Sonnet: The Corpse; More on Iraq

The Corpse

The corpse was dragged into the public square
Where dogs fought over it, chomping on feet
And rolling in the dirt to pull some meat
From the unyielding body, lying bare—
Bare because it had been analyzed
By all the best minds money could recruit,
Who pulled its clothes off like some winter fruit
And broke their teeth on them, and thus surmised
The thing, though dead, maintained some special power,
Resisting all decay like a vampire,
Mocking the immortality we desire
By its intransigence—a steel flower.
The corpse’s name? Iraq. Do you recall
The wounds from Vietnam? Double them all.


As I've said before, I rarely write political poetry or polemical poetry, a bit of a contradiction, since once you become polemical your poetry nearly always descends to mere verse. But truly, nothing has pissed me off as much as our "New Iraq Policy" since Nixon went on television to justify bombing Cambodia.
Since a poet must write what he feels, I keep spouting these anti-war poems. I fear that posting one on a listserv I belong to had me removed, as it was perhaps too controversial--but they haven't written me, I just get no further mail since I shared "Men in Suits" with them. And this a men's group dedicated to peace! To that I say, "fuck 'em."

I don't care if you have a relative in Iraq fighting; to me, supporting them means getting them out. Let's not spend time justifying our occupation as geopolitically necessary.

To say this, one must confront the chorus of, "Then our men died in vain." Not at all. They died for our nation, but nations make mistakes. They died believing, I think, that they were doing the right thing. But military discipline allows for little freedom of thought, a necessity for the chain-of-command in battle, and thus suppressed by the military culture. One needs an ideology to fight, if only "us" vs. "them." I submit in Iraq it is now "us" vs. "us."

And the Democrats are blowing it. They were elected on an anti-war "surge," and now they wring their hands about funding while the President brags on 60 minutes that he'll have the additional troops in place before funding can be challenged, and afterwards, congress won't be able to cut off funding because that would endanger the additional troops. What self-fulfilling poppycock! And yet, it is true: Bush will beat them to the punch because the executive branch can move so much faster than the legislative branch.

I could go on but I'll stop. My anger is a good sign for recovery from depression. Coming out of a depression one often gets very angry. Anger is empowering, sorrow is exhausting.

I won't rate myself for fear of falling.


Thine,

CE

Villanelle: Close Encounter; On Faith

Close Encounter

Be still, old heart, the Lord walks through the grass.
His porcelain feet divide the snaking mist.
You weep and worship as you feel him pass.

You won't look up; your eyes have turned to glass.
Your sin imagines some unholy tryst.
Be still, old heart, the Lord walks through the grass.

You almost raise your eyes, feel small and crass.
He turns toward you and all your muscles twist.
You weep and worship as you feel him pass.

You would look up; you check the hourglass,
Timing the timeless, hoping he'll desist.
Be still, old heart, the Lord walks through the grass.

Eye contact seems too much of a trespass.
You hear him saying, "Stand! Do not resist."
You weep and worship as you feel him pass.

You dodge God's love as if he would harass!
Your faith can't get beyond his mailed fist.
Be still, old heart, the Lord walks through the grass.
You weep and worship as you feel him pass.


This poem approximates how I sometimes feel toward the Almighty. I can't look, I can't even raise my head up because I am so beset with my own sins. This is unfaith; I should believe Christ has taken all my sins upon himself and gaze at God with confidence. But what I believe and what I feel are divided.

When I last wept in church, I don't know if it was because I felt God had failed me or I had failed God. Mostly it is a feeling of being cast out of the garden, of being unable to believe that God would accept me in his loving embrace.

The psyche bleeds into spirituality without doubt. The fact that my mother never held me affectionately, but took care of my needs in a semi-robotic way, certainly influences my inability to accept grace, "God's unmerited favor toward sinners." It's hard for me to imagine, psychologically, a God so loving that he suffers all and forgives all. Christianity is hard to grasp partly because it's too simple: "You mean all I have to do is believe this is true?"

As I said, believing by no means translates to feeling, and humans need feelings to back up their beliefs. In one such as myself, who suffers from a disease of feelings, it's particularly hard. Perhaps that makes my faith more noble, perhaps less. I can't say. I only know, dimly, that there have been times in my life when I did feel whole, forgiven, cleansed, bathed in light. Usually these experiences came in the presence of unspoiled nature rather than church. I make no apologies for that; the redwoods exceed any cathedral I've visited.

A question for thought: How might an autistic person relate to God?--someone the opposite of me, afflicted with no feelings, rather than feelings too intense and sustained.

Here endeth the epistle for the day.


Thine in Timid Faith,

CE

Sonnet: The Preppie's Burden; More on Iraq

The Preppie’s Burden

Nowadays it’s hard to know anything at all.
Experts chatter on the radio
(Though slightly more succinct on video)
About the war, America and withdrawal.
What should we think? The Mideast is a call
To sacrifice our sons for liberty?
To give the region new stability?
We need more troops to dance a dying fall?
The President’s sending in six new brigades.
Many will die from bombs, shrapnel and guns.
Many more will live as amputees.
Generals generally earn their brocade.
Not so for their commander and his chums
Who think to rule millions of Iraqis.


I went to pick up a desk for Kathleen today, from an old barn at a bed and breakfast. The trip took over three hours and my poor back feels it. I’m hoping her having a desk will clear the floor of knitting bags, yarn bags, bags of recipes, and the small lamp frosted with thick stacks of paper.

The thought of a force of 160,000 stabilizing such a sectarian nightmare as Iraq beggars credulity. Imagine 160,000 New Yorkers invading California and you get the picture. LA would swallow them up. Gangs would be competing over territory and how many New Yorkers they could snuff. Respectable folks would be so enraged they would join with the gangs against the enemy. And the enemy would be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. And don't think Angelenos differ much from Southerners in their love of guns.

It’s plain silly. Silly, silly, silly. Why McCain endorses "the surge of troops" is beyond me, but this certainly can’t help his election chances, which argues he is a man of principle. But principle in the name of illogic can only be admired for its stubbornness. And only stubbornness can keep someone convinced that an additional 21,000 troops will make a difference in a country of 30 million.

It's time for someone to say, "We failed, we give up, good-bye." This is not cowardice but wisdom. We have already lost.


Have a good weekend,

CE

Poem: "Half-Belief;" Brief History of the Illness

As I was blogging yesterday I came to a space to pray; it may have been inspired by that Gaelic prayer anonymous posted in yesterday's comments. But as soon as I tried to pray I began to weep; as I've said, faith is a sore point with me. So I tried to jot the experience down, resulting in this raw poem below.


Half-Belief

Thank you for this
disease, O Lord,
that has ravaged my life
like a bulldozer making
and destroying mountains,
or a savage volcano destroying
the very mountain it was
in a cutting rage of lava.

Thank you
for the humility
of never knowing
how I will be--
whether low
as a nematode
or the radiant
king of the universe,
your chosen one.

I only wish the uncertainty
of these shifting states
didn’t undermine
my belief in the future,
my ability to plan.
I am a homeless soul,
a faithless soul.
What I build
I don’t believe in;
what I lose
I never deserved;
what I love
will be taken from me.

But faith declares
I should praise you;
it feels unnatural,
but isn’t that the point?
As a “new creation” in Christ
what was unnatural before
should be natural now.

Little did I know
how hard it would be
to live out this religion.
When I was young
bursting with adrenaline,
hypomanic without knowledge of it,
it seemed easy—but I fear
I was a fake buoyed up by feelings,
by the steam of my imagination.

Past the middle of my life now
how would I know
if my prayer were genuine?
The half-belief
my sickness grants me
is no belief.
(You may disregard
this prayer or not.)



I can't even begin to describe the depth of grief that fills me upon any attempt to practice Christianity. I still believe that it's true, but it's toxic to me. It has always been toxic to me in depressions, sometimes even in manias, when I felt specially chosen and empowered (as Jesus' younger brother--Laugh with me on this because it is funny).

That a man of my intellectual capacities and strength of endurance could become a plaything for a capricious, biochemical disease is an antidote to pride, at the least, besides the obvious irony. Yet as a child and later on, in high school, my chief fear was losing my mind. I must have known something about myself before I ever knew it. My first major depression came at the age of 13, but naturally was dismissed as adolescent weirdness. My second came at 16, while a foreign exchange student to Germany. I had a mild mania at 18, when I became engaged to an unsuitable mate, followed by a deep depression that I endured so as not to break my promise to the woman. Things just tumble on after that until the present day, though the frequency of the extreme moods has decreased with medication. Nevertheless, my first two major adult decisions, marriage and career, resulted from psychotic revelations. I was ill-suited, by temperament, to medicine as well.

All that time I thought it was God's will to marry this woman, God's will to become a doctor, and I feared not doing God's Will. How sick to have the foundations of one's life based on psychosis and fear of displeasing the Almighty.

I suppose by way of background I want everyone to know how sick I've been in the past, and that I'm not that bad now. Experience has taught me much about enduring depression, not that it dampens the pain much, but it does improve the outlook. I know I'll get better someday, I always have before.

So a raw confessional poem and a little history.


Unrateable,

Dr. Chaffin

Poem: Elohim Overheard; The God Delusion

I will take today off from more formal compositions. Instead I offer an unpublished, free verse poem.


Elohim Overheard

"Let us make a creature who knows
he is destined to die
but can imagine eternity--
So a paradoxical longing
shall afflict him all his days
like a disease.”

Isn't this cruelty to animals?

"Let this longing spawn
prophets and religions
as this indefatigable beast seeks relief
from his untenable condition,
a grub haunted by visions.

This is funny?

"We don’t explain our jokes.
Something that breathes
and bleeds yet ponders God
may be the greatest miracle--
it took billions of years
to hear matter pray.”

Why does this matter?

“You are the end of matter.”

How does this ease my suffering?

"Would you rather you didn't exist?"

These are my choices?


As the reader may see, I have had a long and ambivalent relationship with God. I don't really know what "a personal relationship with God" means, though I do pray sometimes--but when I pray I feel that I undermine my own philosophy regarding God. The essence of prayer is praise and thanksgiving, but most of us, including yours truly, resort to requests. I remember praying for a pet dinosaur when I was five. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and God forbid that I should place restrictions on honest prayer. Suffice it to say that I don't think God protects us from anything, but he does help us to endure suffering. If suffering is without meaning, if it is only blowback from Darwinian competition, we are lost.

Dawkins' new book, "The God Delusion," interests me, but I have yet to purchase a copy. So far I have found atheists' arguments unconvincing. As a friend of mine remarked, the only logically consistent position to hold toward God is agnosticism. The scholastic proofs of Anselm and Aquinas now seem, well, anachronistically amusing at best. How I do go on! I have other writing to do today, and I don't want to curtail its accomplishment with the pleasurable and easy bloviation this medium affords me.

My mood seems to change daily. I'm on quite a roller coaster right now. Can go from 0 to 3 kilorats in no time. Wanted to cry yesterday afternoon but instead forced myself to exercise at the gym for two hours.


Unrateable,

CE

Light Verse: Conference

The Conference

A hundred poets came into a room
Armed with their folders, pens, and microphones.
The mediator had a rosy bloom
Of optimism, fearing no millstones
Be hung about his neck
Like deep Atlantic wrecks
Until he would make way for the well-knowns.

Chief among them was Sir Randall Wright
Whose poetry was known to be obtuse.
“It’s not obtuse,” he said, “It’s quite forthright.
“I need a smarter audience for my muse”--
Not realizing he
was dumber than a tree
To claim ignorant readers as excuse.

Behind him, breathing hard, in a beret
McDonald pleaded his preeminence.
“I speak the lingo of the world today.
Wright belongs to the past, I’ve evidence”—
Despite his leaden ear
And prose cut like veneer
With bad line breaks, pretending relevance.

The unfledged followed, rushed the podium
With papers flying, wrangling for a word
With the poor mediator, whose odium
Replaced his prior sanguinity with a turd.
He closed the frenzied show
But first let egos know,
“Your fabled art is grotesque and absurd.”

Now all the poets united against the man
Who fled out back to catch his limousine
They rocked the car, screamed epithets, and ran
To the Arts Council, calling him “obscene.”
He had to laugh out loud
At the rabid, blithering crowd
That populated the faux poetry scene.



I thought that since my mood had improved somewhat, I would not attempt anything serious this morning. There are, as satirized in today's poem, still two major divisions of poets in English since the 1950s: Beatniks and Academics. I know of all the other schools, but it really boils down to Kenneth Koch vs. Richard Wilbur, Maya Angelou vs. Rita Dove., performance poetry vs. written poetry. I suppose my verse leans more towards the academic, as I am poles apart from that great poet of the common people, Charles Bukowski. Here's a link to my essay on him: "Charles Bukowski and the Nadir of American Poetry."

I'm sorry to puke on the Buke. But live, paper bag in hand concealing a cheap bottle of wine, he was quite the entertainer. His childhood is painful to read about, as is most of his adulthood. But pity ought not to influence artistic judgment.

I'm still wondering about goals. Until I reach the goal of not being depressed, it's hard to think of other goals. When I come out of a depression it's a simplifying experience: Life is good as long as I'm not depressed. I can endure anything, assay anything, survive anything--just pray that that anything does not include depression. What matters most is not being depressed. Let's hope I continue to improve.


All for today.

The Unknown Poet

Sonnet: Performers; Why I Won't Reach Celebrity

Performers

On the radio is Bonnie Raitt.
“Anything you want,” she sings, a cover
Of one of Roy Orbison’s last great
Additions to the canon of the lover.
He died not long thereafter, dressed in black
With sunglasses, stiff in life as death.
But would Bonnie or Roy ever take it back,
Trade the crowd’s adulation for the nest
Of home and hearth, routine and routine love?
Must performers’ love bow to the pull
Of one more sparkling wheel of fans to move?
Four walls, a fireplace, it would be dull.
And what of us, wouldn’t we trade it all
To be admired on stage, to swoon and howl?


I loved Roy Orbison and I love Bonnie Raitt, indeed have followed her since the 70s when she wasn't well known. The question I raise here, however, is one that recurs and recurs. Does everyone want to be a celebrity? Or are there those who prefer to be doctors, lawyers and candlestick makers? Those with little entertainment skills might not lust after the spotlight, but most of the talented people who could fill it will never taste it. The media barrage on our psyches only twists the knife of enforced anonymity deeper for the truly talented. Yet, except for a few lucky breaks and family connections, most successful artists got where they are on sheer grit: thousands of auditions, playing the cheap clubs where no one listens to the music, giving poetry readings at open mikes, doing graphic art to support an oil-painting habit, hoping one day for a show.

In a word, I think you have to want it really bad, and sustain a positive attitude on the journey. It never ceases to amaze me that Robert DeNiro, Robert Duvall, and (I think) Dustin Hoffman (if not Pacino) shared a cheap apartment in NY coming up, taking jobs as waiters and what not until their big breaks. But their breaks only came because they never stopped trying.

I think like many I play with success. I don't want to get down in the mud and wrestle for it. I don't want to live out of my car and give readings of a self-published book from here to Oklahoma. I work but I don't work that hard. My sister-in-law shares a horse with Jane Hirschfield and I've never taken advantage of that connection. That's just plain stupid--or else breeding--you don't inopportune an acquaintance of your sister-in-law just to get ahead. If I were properly ambitious I'd be begging to meet her.

I likely don't have it in me to "make it," i.e. garner a larger audience and standing. I think I'm hesitant to pay the social price. As in many things, I am divided about this question down to my bones.

Not feeling half bad for a couple of days. Shhh!

CE

Sonnet: On Mental Health; Meditation

On Mental Health

Nature abhors a vacuum, the mind as well.
Thought must people the unpopulated,
Limitless caverns where blind cave fish dwell,
And keep stalactites and stalagmites mated.
If it weren’t limestone it would be a bear.
If not a bear then an army of snakes.
It doesn’t matter what it puts in there
As long as it’s not empty; the mistake
Is to assume mental health only a blank.
It’s not; the brain is a menagerie
With chimps on wheels and starfish in the tank
To stanch the flow of evil memories.
Better to stuff your head with trivial news
Than leave it open for demonic use.


Christians traditionally meditate on something, a rosary being an easy example. Buddhist tradition would have us empty the mind until it is a windless pond. I have achieved the former but never the latter.

My experience confirms that to meditate on something is better than trying to achieve nothingness--then maybe I am spiritually impaired when it comes to eastern meditation. I did chant for a time, but even then my mind was filled with the words and the rhythm of the chant in order to produce a change in my mind, or its brain waves--which is what we all seek in meditation, from a neurologist's point of view.

I would rather work at a task than meditate, write a bad sonnet than stare at a blank piece of paper. I'm for the pursuit of something, not nothing; a positive good, not just complete detachment. Eliot tries hard to distinguish between attachment and detachment in his Four Quartets, but I don't know if he ever nails them. Both are necessary. The point of this sonnet, I suppose, is that idle hands are the Devil's playthings, and so are empty minds. "You must stand for something or you'll fall for everything."

There is no real dichotomy here, just my inability to meditate passably in an eastern fashion. But in coping with depression, that kind of blankness scares me; I feel my black, looping thoughts curl like snakes to enter into all the mouseholes of the empty house. Perhaps if I were healthier I would change the final couplet.

2 Kilorats,

CE

"Because"

Because

Because of you I wear a seat belt.
Because of you I know what love is.
Because of you I have sympathy for animals.
Because of you I know how a woman can worship a man with her body.
Because of you I’m not afraid to come home
Because of you I’m not afraid to go out.
Because of you I watch my blood pressure and take my pills.
Because of you I know woman as well as a man can.
Because of you I am a better writer.
Because of you I know loss because I nearly lost you.
Because of you I have wept in front of the children.
Because of you I have broken doors in anger.
Because of you I can sometimes move gracefully.
Because of you I dress better.
Because of you I think my life might not be a waste.
Because of you I believe in the love of God.
Because of you I am always in love.
If only God were as loving as you!


People seemed to enjoy yesterday's "pattern poem," distinguished by a repetition reminiscent of the pantoum. In any case, this was written for Kathleen, who, despite the greatness of her brain, is still ruled by her heart--which is a gift to all who know her.


2.5 Kilorats,

CE

Poem: "Everyone;" Depression Update

Everyone

Everyone fears their own death
But everyone has a vague faith in an afterlife.
Everyone goes to the parade
But everyone forgets their umbrellas.
Everyone goes to see strippers
But everyone knows it was only for a bachelor party.
Everyone has had diarrhea
But everyone denies soiling their pants.
Everyone has bad credit
But everyone can buy a car.
Everyone means to exercise more
But everyone is the victim of television.
Everyone has a pet of some kind
But everyone has to clean up after them.
Everyone loves the rain
But everyone hates getting wet.
Everyone loves to party
But everyone knows “party” is a code word for drinking and drugs.
Everyone says they like poetry
But everyone says they don’t understand it.
Everyone is opposed to war
But everyone watches it happen.
Everyone went to college
But everyone didn’t graduate.
Everyone’s future is rosy
But everyone’s past is an ankle weight.
Everyone lives selflessly for others
But everyone hoards chocolates and dope.
Everyone’s had homosexual contact
But everyone denies it.
Everyone has prejudices
But everyone loves blacks and Jews.
Everyone is afraid to speak up in class
But everyone knows the answers.
Everyone was properly breastfed
But everyone sucked on a bottle, too.
Everyone loves nature
But everyone prefers an RV.
Everyone has written a book
But everyone is unpublished.
Everyone follows celebrities
But everyone says they don’t care.
Everyone believes in God
But everyone evades church.
Everyone has been told they’re dying
But everyone has outsmarted their doctor.
Everyone is sensitive to a fault
But everyone is a hard ass about money.
Everyone loves to dance
But everywhere the dance floors are empty.
Everyone could have been a rock star
But everyone didn’t have time to practice.
Everyone could have been Gandhi
But everyone didn’t want to wear diapers.
Everyone could have been Lincoln
But everyone didn’t want to be that ugly.
Everyone could have been Dr. King
But everyone was too white.
Everyone could have been a god
But everyone had other things to do.


Though formulaic and over-generalized, I nevertheless find this poem entertaining in its depiction of human foibles. I seem to be running ahead of my blog, as I now have two new poems I haven’t posted yet.

My crying jags come twice a day now, sometimes three times, in general at 11 AM and 4 PM, with other occasions dependent on circumstances, as when I saw my psychiatrist yesterday or when Kathleen foolishly asks me, “How are you doing?” Or worse, “How are you feeling?” It’s that personal connection to others who care that really slays me. I suppose I feel unworthy, or perhaps it’s that I feel safe revealing my inner sadness to someone I trust. But my sadness is generic, there is no object to it, it just is. Naturally the frontal cortex always seeks a reason out: I don’t like where I’m living, I miss my children, I’m a failure as a poet, what’s the point, I’m bad with money, I should do better by Kathleen, yada yada. All these points are irrelevant, I assure you. When the primitive part of the brain is askew, when the amygdalas and limbic system malfunction, the neocortex (what distinguishes us as humans, what allows us self-consciousness, reason and language) seeks a reason—feelings should have antecedents, the brain knows that much. But the brain knows too little; in severe depression the sadness and anxiety are self-generating; the brain is stuck like a scratched record; and the goal of treatment is to free the brain from the reptile feedback loop that constantly renders your feelings inappropriate to your situation.

To use a simple test, I have been blissful under the worst of circumstances and suicidal under the best. So one question I have asked my patients is: “If you won the lottery tomorrow would you be any happier?” The truly depressed answer “No.”

On the positive side, look how many words I’ve spilled on the nuances of depression. It seems an endless subject and I suppose it is. But it must be kind of depressing reading about it. I hope today’s poem brings a chuckle.


3.5 Kilorats,

CE

Sonnet: Self-Portrait; Gibberish

Self Portrait

Take off all your disguises. There you are,
Like John the Baptist naked save for fur.
I would not spoon your soul out from a jar
Or squeeze you like a tube of brown manure.
I only want to know your naked heart,
Its tangled bridges to your fortress mind
Beset with Harpies, Gorgons, pried apart
Because your integration was a blind
For separation of the self from soul,
Division of the heart from the intent,
Dissembling for the public in your role
Of thaumaturgic poet discontent.
I’ve lost you once more, Craig, you’re hard to pin.
Sit for the portrait. We’ll begin again.



Prose Stream

Sit for the portrait. The brush strokes the canvas in favonian languidness. Who knows of the flamulated owl? Who mutilated the television with crayons? The blade iron that heats and cuts? Cuisinart for reptiles only. As if man would eat crabs, or oysters. Then man's like a rat; he'll eat anything, even shoe leather when he's starving. No one has to starve today but out of greed humans prevent other humans from eating. It is a cruel cruel cruel world out there, Dorothy. Don't trust your ruby slippers; get a kick-ass pair of boots.

Saw my shrink today. My case looks pretty hopeless. May have to find a way to get ECT. Anyone know how to start a foundation? Shock a poet today!


3.5 Kilorats,

Craig Erick

Sonnet: Sad Harvest; Back to Depression

Sad Harvest

There is no madness like hatred of self.
It’s not confined to those with diagnoses.
There is a poison book upon the shelf
That makes allowance for all psychoses.
You wake; you dread yourself; you dread your mind
Where deadening thoughts orbit like lifeless moons,
Still, have sufficient gravity to grind
Your music down to an ice cream truck’s tune.
Wake, you could wake—but how would you even know?
The vulture on your shoulder keeps you blind.
Communicate by smells. By touch. By show.
Endure your looping brain—pause is rewind.
Sad harvest that a human being should turn
Upon itself. Shackle, beat and burn.


If the sonnet is depressing, well so it is. I am not well. I am more pretending to be well than formerly, seeking activities to distract the central maelstrom of self-despite. I wonder if any here have read “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.” Throughout the book the protagonist preserves a despite for himself, no matter how much he helps the land to which he’s been transported. He’s more than a reluctant hero; he’s a self-despising, cynical hero who feels helpless and at the same time responsible for much of the tragedy that besets his new world. I don’t claim to have his powers, naturally, but I identify with his feelings toward himself. I think the series is pretty good for the fantasy genre.

How shall I greet the New Year? “Same as it always was.” These artificial divisions of time do little to center me, though those who celebrate en masse must enjoy a different experience. I’d like to wear a lamp shade on my head, but I’ve only done it once at a party with fellow psychiatric residents. Except that we be surrounded by other revelers, it is hard to capture the spirit of a holiday. There is the religious exercise for Christmas, but I am not that devout. Church makes me weep anyway.

I’m fragile; I’m not well. I refrain from crying, it upsets my wife. Sometimes I can’t help it. I wish I could say the new antidepressant has improved things, but it only did so temporarily, and then my melancholy descended back in its miasmic inevitability.

Nine months of depression for a manic-depressive is not unusual. But it is extremely painful, and it seems the brief happy times I have had within that span are such anomalies that I can hardly relate to them. Clearly I need for more social interaction. While involved with other people I feel better, think less about myself; the afterglow lasts about an hour but it is better than no contact at all. I am, after all, a gregarious person when not beset by a major depression. To encounter me now would be different; I am not that person, more of a listener, more of a background shadow. But if buoyed up by the circumstances, by the conversation, I can occasionally exceed my melancholy and participate—and once I do I am well-received as an “interesting person.” Little do they know how much I bore myself.

I’m truly sorry to begin this year with another confession of depression, but the tears that crease my face as I write can admit no other truth, and dissembling on a blog would make a blog pointless—unless it was simply a shill for promotion.


Back to 3 Kilorats,

CE

Villanelle: Avoidant; Hope for the New Year

Avoidant

You wake: the house is cold, the light is dim.
Make coffee, walk the dog, turn on the heat.
The redwoods eat the sun; the light is thin.

You think about the things that might have been:
New car, big house, the children bright and neat.
You wake: the house is cold, the light is dim.

You know you’ve got to take it on the chin.
You wish life weren’t so damnably concrete!
The redwoods eat the sun; the light is thin.

The light is thinner than an actor’s skin.
(To read your poems out loud would be a feat.)
You wake; the house is cold, the light is dim.

Where do we get the courage to dig in?
It isn’t for survival we compete.
The redwoods eat the sun; the light is thin.

I used to tackle tasks with a mild grin.
Now I turn my head as they accrete.
You wake: the house is cold, the light is dim.
The redwoods eat the sun; the light is thin.


Today’s poem started off as a sonnet, then the villanelle form took over. It’s easy to write about the immediate because “the immediate you have with you always.” Per usual I make no judgment of the poem’s worth; I find that impossible for any poem unless it be years old. I have not submitted any of these formal attempts to anyone; one thing I must do in the New Year is aggressively submit to magazines. I don’t know if these formal attempts of mine are any more than anachronistic curiosities.

Our landlord just stopped by to tell us our heating bill would be $240. This is patently unfair since he divides the three units by inhabitants, not square feet. He said he would switch to the square footage next bill, but that doesn’t help us now, especially with the increased outlay (always inescapable) for Christmas.

This is New Year’s Eve. There is much I could do today, I suppose, but in the spirit of the holiday (as in the spirit of my poem) I likely won’t do much besides work on my writing. I did sweep the porches yesterday, bring in the trash cans, and did some other minor duties associated with reality, but after all, a poet lives in his head.

Will all practical poets successful at the business of life please raise your hands?

I have never been good with money; I am not neat; I am usually anxious when I pay bills, fearing I won’t have enough, indeed, leaving them unopened for a spell like fortune cookies whose fortunes I know will be bad. This may have started when I was a poor student for so many years, scraping by. Then even when my income was greatest I had to file for bankruptcy. To me, money means unhappiness. To the normal mind, I suppose, money is a blessing. Much of my attitude stems from my family of origin; money always caused unhappiness, it seemed, especially in the hands of my father as a bludgeon to confirm our unworthiness.

Yet as impaired as I may be, I can still benefit the human race, I can still dream of a future more amenable than my present circumstances. This is hope, the one virtue most needed in depression, and the one virtue least available in the same.

Here’s to Hope in the New Year!


Thine,

CE


p.s. My reference to “anonymous” yesterday included more than one person, Norm. ;-)

Sonnet: "Not a Book;" Hope in Striving

Not a Book

A twisted oak of possibilities,
An auto race outside the sheltered bowl,
Menu of sanities, insanities,
The rodent tunnels leading to one hole.
A lot to think about; a lot to do.
You need illusions to answer the bell.
To think about yourself will surely screw
Your chances for the prize; down you fell
(Not that you couldn’t box, we know you can)
Because your self-awareness let you down.
Instead of punching you thought of your span,
Mortality, the slough in which we drown.
Take your head out of your ass and look:
This is your life and not some fucking book.


It seems with formal verse that the sonnet is my default mode. The common verse of ballads rarely appeals; villanelles nearly always lend themselves to some serious drama; triolets are five-finger exercises; pantoums are just damn difficult and don’t, at least in my hands, qualify as lyrics, more as epigrams. I like to mix Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, although today’s is purely Shakespearean. And I don’t abide by the rule that each quatrain should have its own temporary conclusion. As for blank verse, who would read it? It belongs to the pre-modern or Victorian period and won’t fly in the wake of Prufrock--even though Prufrock is largely blank verse.

This is, of course, a positive sonnet urging participation in life rather than omphaloskepsis, or navel-staring. In my depressions I am surely guilty of this error; yet it is not my fault that the human mind has the capacity to fold in on itself until there is nothing left but a vague yearning for one’s former personality. As Kathleen says, “I’ve seen you inhabit your face in these last few days.”

Indeed, depression is like dispossession and normal mood like possession, when our souls possess our bodies instead of having fled them. I spoke to my brother-in-law about it recently, describing how in severe depression one feels without a soul. “Really?” he said. In that sentence I knew he had never experienced depression (and we know that 90% of the populace never does).

I admire the shit out of my brother-in-law. He works long days at his law firm and when he comes home almost immediately takes up a project in the garden or around the house, else returns to work on his computer. He loves to work. And in his working he forgets himself. I envy him for that discipline and productivity; yet if I shared his nature I would likely never have written a poem. Yet I would rather be more like my brother-in-law than write another poem. Unfortunately my nature leaves me little choice.

But I did not become a doctor by being lazy or averse to work. I worked my butt off, not only in class but outside school to help support myself and my young family. And this did not inhibit my other pleasures of music and poetic composition and fishing. Medical school was a time of balance, I think, between work and leisure. Yet now, on disability, I feel I have too much leisure. It is up to me to undertake work of whatever kind. For me, in the immediate, that means dusting off my novel, designed as an airport book, putting my columns and short fiction together for another book, and submitting my poetry to august journals that might improve my reputation. But at 52, I sometimes feel as if I am pursuing “a dying fall.” Achieving a reputation at my age is a low probability. But that does not make it unnecessary; it’s in the striving that we live and gather hope.

I do feel as if I am on the cusp of something but I don’t know what it is. A major re-evaluation of my life? (I mean healthy introspection without unnecessary dwelling on my deficits.) I want to participate in life, not be crushed by it. I want to complete my literary projects, not avoid them. But it is in the striving that we live. A man without it is not truly alive. Hope must stand before us like an Orthodox icon. Without it we are lost, as I have been these last nine months. Nine months of depression. Could it be over? Doubtful. But with each step I take toward striving I move farther away from the toadstool on which I’ve been sitting, immobilized.


Won’t estimate my rattage today.

Thine,

CE

Power Outage

We returned from Christmas on Wednesday, Dec. 27, whereupon we discovered that the storm from Tuesday, with 60 mph winds, had caused a power outage in our rural domicile. Most recent estimates is that we might have power by Sunday. My computer battery is ancient, thus I can't post from home. I'm here at a coffee bar using wireless to write this.

We have no heat, no plumbing, no stereo, no stove, no nothing. We can read or play Scrabble. I bought a Coleman lantern for some cheerier night light other than my bluish headlamp, and one propane canister lasts the evening--even though it warns us not to burn it indoors, due to CO concerns. With the windows open, we woke up alive. Don't know if I should be disappointed in that or not, as I am still treading the cogwheels of depression on and off--clearly I need more to do, more with which to engage myself, so that I think about myself less. On the whole, what with the new antidepressant and the buoyant love of my family over Christmas, I am doing better, but I am wary of any temporary improvements given this year's history.

When we wake up it is butt-ass cold, forty or below. It's the same reading at night in bed. Kathleen is wearing my Arctic expedition weight polypropylene long underwear and dreads to get out of it in the morning. My hands are so cold she shrieks if I touch her skin. That hasn't prevented at least one episode of amorousness; many children are born in the Fall because of it. Luckily, we are past the age of conception, unless it be the conception of our own old age and doom.

Our oldest daughter, a single working mother, was delighted with her gift of a day at a spa. Our younger daughters sent us a number of thoughtful gifts. Kathleen baked a storm of cookies, including absolutely delicious truffles which would afflict my waistline with further excess.

As for our lack of power, there is no one to complain to, no one to sue--it is "an act of God." There were some 133 stations in our county alone that were knocked out; power has been restored to Mendocino Village but four miles out in the redwoods is a buck dancer's bet as to whether we'll have heat by New Year's. Still the human animal is phenomenally adaptable, even unto death. It's so cold in our house that the ice cubes in the freezer lasted two days before melting.

I suppose we could start a 12-Step program to cope with our powerlessness over power, but by the time we had our first meeting, people would likely be addicted to power again.

Unfortunately, unlike the two other units on our property, we have no wood stove or fireplace. Our new neighbor from farther south actually had the prescience to bring a generator with him, so we can here it puttering at night while his house is bright with light. We could ask him to borrow his toilet, but as he is connected to the same well pump, he likely has the same problem we do. (Before I realized our new limitations I unfortunately made a large deposit. Now I must attend to business exclusively outdoors.)

Love to all my poet/blogging acquaintances, from LKD to Twitches, from Sam Rasnake to Jim Zola, from anonymous to inconsequential, from Elisa to Chris, from Rob Mackenzie to Beau Blue, and to all I left off this short list.

I pray this new year will be better for me and my illness. I will be writing down some New Year's goals, but I won't share them here lest I be held to them by a disapproving and disappointed reading populace.


At some level of obsessive kilorats, bloody but unbowed,

CE


Where's My MTV?

The power is out. Our butts are cold.
We don't add to global warming.
Despite this, if the truth be told
Daylight's only good for farming.

Holiday Hiatus; Blogger Begs Off

I just want to say to all those who drink from this questionable well that I'm on hiatus until the New Year--unless I get the blogging bug before then.

I Hhad a wonderful Christmas at my sister's, with all sibs there and various relatives. I felt so good in their company I hope I don't crash afterwards.

I realize also that one thing that has been eating at me is my environment; our rental is small and the redwoods render it claustrophobic. When we looked at other rentals I wanted something with an ocean view, but we didn't qualify with our credit. I have an unofficial lease until next August, but I really must get out of there and get a place with a view, always a necessity in my life.

And how about that troop surge in Iraq? We are so blessed with our leaders and their creative logic.

"Hey, Hey, George W. Bush; how many kids have you turned to mush?"


Merry Merry God Bless You Every One (and Toto Too!)


Craig Erick

CBE: Pharisees

Another Chinese Brush Experiment: the poet can only go forward and not change a single word except for grammar or spelling. Enjoy the roughness of unfiltered verse, unlike my usual formal posts, which, surprisingly, are usually just as rough in terms of immediate composition.



Pharisees

Oh you brood of vipers with your venomous hippocracy,
Steaming in the waft of your self-righteousness
Above the artichokes that take so long to cook.
You don't tremble at the tripartite God.

I went to you once, to an elder
For advice about dating and whatnot
He decided my girlfriend was an abomination
While his wife reminded him of his own petting (early in their relationship).

Should I countenance the religious with anything but scorn?
Should I lick their boots for a scrap of forgiveness?
I do not think the humble know them.
Give me the humble every time.

The sun rises on the righteous and unrighteous.
The sun is implacable in its fairness.
The gold disk illuminates the dark corners
Of human lies, traditions, protections, evasions.

This would be a moral poem if it had a moral.
But it is a moral poem, if deceivers are understood.
I knew a man once with a thousand Krugerands.
He also owned semi-automatic rifles and taught Sunday School.

Do we need people like this to advance religion?
The slavery of the Indians to the preternatural host?
The incorporation of folk beliefs into the bleeding Jesus?
The mother gods become the blue and white Mary?

Fuck the systems, fuck the gods.
True light comes from true light, there is no mistaking it.
It cuts the soul with a diamond-edged blade
And leaves a man with nothing except a beggar's bowl.

Post for December 22 : Chinese Brush Experiment

I would like to do a Chinese Brush Experiment, an exercise where the poet can go only forward, never back--except to change line breaks, punctuation, grammar or spelling. The words themselves may not be changed in any significant way. Here I go:


Introducing

Demosthenes chewed stones but spit them out,
his tongue ungrateful for the discipline she'd learned
from pebbles wrapped in saliva.
Not an announcement, no parasol and green balloon
over the astronomy lab, shame it is.
As I was saying, the shortest route between two points
is woven like a snake, even two snakes mating
which is a vision you can't be responsible for.
I mean in a general sense, no presupposition
the black girl in the orange raincoat smiles
for no reason, you grip your cane, shield your heart
and take suspicion for your lover. Shame.
It's not the same for everybody, you know--
but as I get older I want to be more open,
coiled to try to understand, intent upon meaning,
without dismissing the ravings of the inexperienced
nor promoting the ignorance of academic singularization,
to live with an open door because the house of your life is stout
and your fear is a trace element
folding on itself atomically
the nuclear blast so green
green fire, the parasol on the desert was dust.
Dangerous dust. Ha! The sore point:
how the ulcer of aggression feeds the maggot of desire.
We were talking about that, and the confessions
of the Samoan twins, accused of terminal obesity
exceeding the cholesterol limit
by two kiloblubbers.
Thank you very much.
You have been very kind.
May you all be blessed in all things by the grace of God,
Amen.

Anti-War Villanelle

Hail to the Chiefs

With their boot heels they grind us down to sand.
No nest to feather for the common man.
We were a country; now we are a land.

There is no grave apocalypse at hand.
The threat of it they use to fuel their plan.
With their boot heels they grind us down to sand.

All we like sheep give in to their demands
While amputees can’t move their own bedpans.
We were a country; now we are a land.

The elite rule with their adrenal glands
And slaver at the chance to bomb Iran.
With their boot heels they grind us down to sand.

A mad idealist is in command.
I’m sure he’s never read the damn Koran.
We were a country; now we are a land.

Elected, aren’t they? With a Marine band!
(Appointments go to suits in a sedan.)
With their boot heels they grind us down to sand.
We were a country; now we are a land.


I have never been a political poet, but recent developments have driven me to write about the insanity going on. Send more troops? Hilarious. Say we have 300,000, which is impossible. The Iraqis have 30 million and a gun in nearly every home. And this is an urban guerilla war, not the kind of thing that lends itself to large conventional troops. It reminds me the carnival game, "Whack-A-Mole." Soon as you hit one gopher another comes up.

Again I am impressed by the lack of public and vociferous protest. There are a few, like congressman Murtha. But it seems all the major players see our continued involvement in Iraq some kind of necessity for stabilizing the Mideast. I am repeating myself, but you might as well try to tame a brood of vipers.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I guess I'll write my congressman for starters. Then there is Poets for Peace, which I've never really pursued. Perhaps one of my political poems would suit them.

I won't comment on my mood.

CE

Sonnet: Gym Talk; More on Iraq

Gym Talk

I exercised today. I walked two miles
Uphill in forty minutes, then I swam
1000 yards, staring at blue tiles
In crosses underwater. No cardiogram
Was needed, since my pulse behaved itself.
True, my back ached while swimming and walking
But pain is no good measurement of health.
I slipped into the Jacuzzi. A man was talking
About impeaching Bush, as many do.
“Clinton’s little lies harmed none,” he said,
“While Bush, that preening Christian cockatoo
“Believes more sacrifice honors the dead.”
Honor the living, I say, pull up the tents!
We’ve done no good; look at the evidence.


Today’s sonnet reflects my experience at the gym yesterday, though the events and subsequent conversation have, of course, been manipulated for the sake of brevity. But the passion of men my age in the locker room discussion of the present administration was amazing. I haven’t seen citizens exercised like this in a long time.

On the other hand, where are the protests? Where is the million man march against the war? Why are there no great demonstrations? Is it simply a matter of scale, that we’ve only lost 3000? Or is it because the economy is good, despite the drain Iraq puts on the treasury? Or has apathy reached new levels in our society?

Do we think, “That’s just Washington as usual and there’s nothing we can do about it?” Cindy Sheehan may be a flake, but she had the right idea. But the point is not to throw one dead son in Bush’s face, rather to throw the whole debacle in his face, preferably with a huge demonstration or a national demonstration coordinated locally, with protests from LA to NY. But where are the organizers? If people behaved fifty years ago as they do today, segregation might still exist.

If anyone knows of any effective movements opposing the war that I might join, please write me. I am constantly amazed at the lack of protest over our current fatal misdirection. What, we blew up the Mideast so we have to stay there and try to put the pieces of the balloon back together? Get a life, America.


CE

Sonnet: Watershed

Watershed

Pain ravages her face and makes her old;
I see new bags beneath her sea-green eyes.
She stays in bed a lot, dreading the cold;
She goes for heating pads, never for ice.
I watch her wince when she exits the van;
It takes a while for her to straighten and stand.
Her disks won’t stabilize and nothing can
Restore their architecture to God’s plan.
I love her desperately and she’s in pain.
Her pain is amplified within my head.
The helplessness I feel is the same
All humans carry to love’s watershed.
Watershed makes rivers, even of tears,
Though grief remains after the water clears.


I have suffered degenerative disk disease for so long that it is a part of my life I endure without too much thought. But a fresh disk impairment can be disabling. Chronic pain is always better than acute pain. And Kathleen, my wife, is suffering acute pain. We all stand by helplessly so often when our loved ones suffer, but often there is nothing to do but stand by. Thus the genesis of today's verse; I hesitate to call it a poem.

CE

Sonnet: Winter Sun; Money on My Mind

Winter Sun

The winter sun is weak, light without heat.
It doesn’t warm the ravens or the gulls.
They sit on rocks, feathers over feet.
They accept the sun but still, summer pulls.
The sea lions are immune to such decrease.
Their blubber warms them better than a fire
While mice shiver in holes for a surcease
From this icy sun they deem a liar.
Sun should warm, sun should power the earth
With juice-splashed fields and a riot of grass
But the winter sun spawns only a stillbirth--
Why bears sleep in caves to let it pass.
Still, a sterile globe is better than none.
The cruel disk is, after all, the sun.


I want to thank all of you who have shared my journey and, for the last three months, my deluge of formal verse. After church yesterday I think I went down a notch; I didn’t know if I was ready to attend and I wasn’t. My mind keeps circling money for some reason:

“You’re 52, why don’t you own a home?
“You have no retirement plan.
“Your disability income could be cancelled in a New York minute.
“If you managed your income better you could save for the future.
“You don’t even have life insurance for Kathleen. (To be fair, it’s not that I haven’t tried. I have been declared uninsurable. As soon as they read I’m a manic-depressive whose father committed suicide, it’s all over.)
“What will happen in a major illness? Kathleen may need a hip replacement, her hips have been so bad. How are you going to pay for that without health insurance?
“You should be giving more money to charity.
“You’re impractical and will never get a hand on reality.
“No way your Social Security, if it’s still available, will be enough to live on.”
“Maybe you could get one of those cheap trailers in a mobile home park someday if you’re lucky.”

Now some of these thoughts are wise and necessary; what isn’t is to have them circling in my head every time my mind is not occupied with something else. In my natural, non-depressed state, I don’t worry about money. In my depressed state I can’t keep it out of my head. And there’s nothing to do about it now. This is Christmas month, after all.

I don’t want to share more than one obsession a day so I’ll quit here.

Kathleen is suffering terribly from a degenerating disk in her back. She spends most of her time in bed to relieve the pressure. Other than securing pain medicines for her, there’s nothing I can do. I know the disease Oh so well. But it doesn’t help my mood to watch her suffering.

At 1 Kilorat, maybe more, I’m confused. (That’s a -1 one on the mood scale for any who haven’t read that portion of my blog concerning Roger Dier. And for most people it would be more like a -3 or -4; my ratings are higher because of all the depressions I’ve endured.)


Thine as ever,

Craig Erick

Sonnet Sunday: A Question of Faith

A Question of Faith

Six gold candlesticks and a central cross
Grace the altar but I cannot embrace
The vacuum of our Lord’s missing face,
The cinnamon fire that turns our gold to dross.
Where is he? He was never at a loss
For words before, except during his passion.
Jesus is, quite simply, out of fashion.
His guidance might as well be a coin toss.

When I was younger I gave my heart to him,
Eager to serve and suffer, eager to please.
In the vacuum where he doesn’t dwell
I sought him with all my being, with life and limb.
Now church just makes me cry, I’m never at ease.
If I lost what I never had, am I in hell?



If I began to talk about the grief that the Christian Faith produces in me, I would have to write a book, not a blog. I was converted at 16 and had a wild ride through cults, an undiagnosed manic-depressive who got so spiritual that Christ had to tell me when to brush my teeth. And my manias have always taken a Christian bent.

To sit in church, as I did today, and feel like an utter outcast from God--sure, the people are nice--but it's as if nothing is there for me but grief. I cry for my mistaken faith; I cry for my inability to feel anything towards God or the faith; I cry for "betting my life on Christ" and having my life blow up in my face. I think my sin is presumption, the expectation that something good should have happened within or without me because of my devotion. Then I think it might be grief for an earlier time when I could feel devotion, feel something behind the hymns and worship.

This is a troublesome area for me, but I dared going to church today despite my illness. I don't know if the tears were a good or bad thing; probably good, since I knew, vaguely, what I was crying about. I was crying about my extreme disappointment with God, as if someone shot my father. God is inscrutable to me. Christ I can't relate to. I believe in the Holy Spirit but would never say he's working in my life. Religion continues to be toxic to me, though I wish with all my heart it would offer the comfort it seems to offer others.


At 0.5 Kilorats,

CE

Poem: The Passing

It's always dangerous to post a first draft of a poem, but in these months of writing in form, everything has been a first draft. Besides, I think two days of Dweebler's shenanigans are driving readers away. He is an intellectual low brow and delights in mocking my work. In any case, here's a poem I wrote very quickly this morning.


The Passing

I used to pay attention to the flickering moth
circling the yellow light and the dust
swirling in a rain of particles
at night, on the porch.

I used to watch fog creep up the valley,
swept up in its graceful blanketing
of the fir-green hillsides and the river
it entirely obscured.

It is not Sehnsucht that I seek, not the pull
of regret in the gut like having been in love
and having your love fail. It is more
that I don’t pay attention.

There is no poetry left in me,
no magic words to roll around my tongue
until they connect with my feet
and we are one.

I don’t play the guitar much, either.
My soft fingers recoil
from the wires that sing;
I listen to the radio.


A bit elegaic, I think, but few of my friends continued to play the guitar into their fifties. I have. But as this poem demonstrates, I lack magic in my life. Yet part of that is surely due to the onset of benefits from my new antidepressant, Cymbalta. It has really quieted my brain. I'm able to read again. Maybe someday I'll be up for reading poetry again. There is magic there, but it takes some work.

All for today,

CE

Dweebler and the Neocons

Since I am not inspired, my cousin, Dweebler Cramden, has consented to compose another startling poem. (He would correct me and say that it is not a poem, that he only writes verse. My mistake.)


Dynamic Duo

Oh hear the drum! The neocons
Believe their Tetragrammatons
Will fool the public well.

What they don’t know: the average Joe
Can apprehend the quagmire, so
There’s nothing left to tell.

Cheney and Bush were in such a rush
To give their policies a push
(And send Iraq to hell).

This demonstrates to potentates
The power to manipulate
Is not a one-time sell.

Cheney talks from the side of his mouth.
His thoughts go east, his tongue goes south.
(His head needs no gel)

While our commander takes a gander
In all the states that do not slander
What we’re doing so swell.

Bush loves his navel, he loves to travel
He loves to pound his favorite gavel
And smile for clientele.

His self-delusion’s so complete
He lets Christ wash his dirty feet
Inside a roach motel.

A war that’s lost cannot be won
The chance of history is gone,
Broken our citadel.

But these darn fools invent the rules
They learned from all their "think tank" schools
Until we must rebel.

Get up and wave your protest flag
Against your favorite gasbag
And try to ignore the smell.


Now I don't necessarily agree with vituperous vitriol my cousin espouses, then he is also a British citizen and can't know the bounds of American civility. I apologize to any who were scandalized by Dweebler, but he would very much like to hear from anyone who enjoys his verse, especially if she is a wealthy, well-padded woman of a certain age.


(Nearly neutral but afraid to claim it--0.5 kilorats),

CE

Stuffing the Flag by Dweebler Cramden

My cousin, Dweebler Cramden, had a court appearance today, where the boredom and the flag drove him to pen the following:


Stuffing the Flag

I am a criminal—the court is clear.
An orange jumpsuit waits for me somewhere.
My crime? I stuffed a flag straight up my rear.

I think burning the flag is insincere.
It’s been done and done—it’s de rigueur
While my stunt makes the flag just disappear

And reappear again, no worse for wear—
A little rumpled, ready for laundry care
And salvageable for another dare.

The flag covered my ass when I began
But by degrees diminished so my can
Was all there was to see. I am a man

But I swear my genitals were out of view—
Only my ass and the red, white, and blue.
Still I was charged with public nudity

Although my cape was always standing by
Honored inside my body cavity
Where even the police ought not to pry.


As you can see, my cousin tends toward earthiness. He was in a pre-trial motion about misleading a wealthy woman of a certain age that he was Orson Welles. I say, what does it hurt? He's a gigolosaurus specializing in lonely fat women. He provides a charitable service and is much more entertaining than a mere escort. I hope he gets off with a warning. He can always move back to England, but he says there are more ample women here. He's a fine businessman and a credit to the obese everywhere.

Thanks, Dweebler,

CE

Villanelle: Fog; On Iraq

Trial by Fog

Enclosed inside the intimacy of mist
Our visibility’s but fifty feet.
Beyond this bubble we do not exist.

The road is perilous. It turns and twists
As if its narrowing shoulders have to meet
Enclosed inside the intimacy of mist.

I want to scream, I want to raise my fist
And curse the small circumference of our light.
Beyond this bubble we do not exist.

This driving makes me itch. I should desist.
We have to trust the way like idiot sheep
Enclosed inside the intimacy of mist.

Back home we make a fire, share a kiss.
The fog’s outside, a monster with no teeth.
Beyond this bubble we do not exist.

Head on your lap, relieved, I feel blessed.
The breathing of your belly makes me complete
Enclosed inside the intimacy of mist.
Beyond this bubble we do not exist.


I have refrained from the political arena thus far in my blog, although being an American I feel myself as qualified as anyone else to comment.

The parallels to Vietnam are not funny. That war was "winnable." Then we could "contain" Communism through a corrupt state. Then it was "peace with honor," which meant massive withdrawal and a tacit admission that we had our butts kicked.

The throes of policy makers at present are legion and unnecessary. Anyone with a wit of sense can see nothing will improve the situation and that our leaving may be more helpful than our staying, since one infidel enemy will be removed from the conflict. But to stay to train Iraqi troops, many of whom no doubt belong to death squads, is a lame excuse in supporting a government that cannot stand on its own, just like Vietnam.

Who cares about destabilizing the region? It's already destabilized. And whatever our support does, it only prolongs the inevitable.

To have Bush running around with a divine light in his eyes, telling us this is the war on terror we're going to win, makes him certifiable, truly. He's a man who believes in his own neocon vision more than reality. It's downright embarrassing. Europe is right to snicker. What a tar baby we have embraced, what a quagmire of mismanagement and fatal underestimation. I thought we were going into Iraq to search for WMDs; turns out we invaded to occupy, a notoriously bad idea in a post-colonial world.

The Iraq Study Group didn't go far enough, but no matter. Looks like Bush isn't going to listen to them anyway. He must listen to the secret voice of God, like Pat Robertson. How else could he be so sure of himself?

All for today,

CE

Sonnet: Celebrity; More Mushrooms

Celebrity

I heard the raven call me to its nest.
Blue wings on black, he made a low-pitched caw.
I went to climb his tree; I did my best;
Thick overhanging limbs made me withdraw.
He ruffled in a redwood far above me
And still he called, and still I answered back.
I think he was the first bird ever to love me
Even though I was white and he was black.
We strive for some great prize above our station,
To win the lottery or find a cure
For cancer, or to uplift our sad nation
Embroiled in a suicidal war.
I’ll take the raven, he’s high enough for me.
Let others scramble for celebrity.


I returned to the sonnet today because yesterday’s was so inferior I had to make a second stab at it. I love the way sonnets often unfold; the first eight lines are a set up, and the last six often an exposition. Certainly that obtains for today’s offering.

I wasn’t as anxious this morning and have no notion why. I made the coffee and went back into my html madness, trying to construct a website as the final project for my class. I’m not the greatest detail person, and in code you can make very few mistakes. So I end up scanning my code for missing quotation marks or semicolons that can make the whole difference for what code follows. With luck I’ll have a website up by the new year. Then anyone interested in my poetry and essays can go straight to them and avoid the blog. Or do both. I do admit some of my literary essays may be slow going for the uninitiated, but I believe the prose is clear—it’s the ideas that give some trouble, or so I flatter myself to believe.

Had a much needed tune-up for our beater van, from which we’ve lost, in our travels, all the back seats, and whose sliding doors only open on the driver’s side. At least we recently paid it off, and though ugly, it is reliable. I would love to drive it into a tony LA restaurant and hand the keys to the attendant, sandwiched between a Jaguar and a Rolls.

It’s raining pretty steadily here. Yesterday on our walk I nabbed a King Bolete and a Chanterelle (prized mushrooms). Kathleen called me her “truffle hound.” So after all these years I’ve finally discovered what I’m good at—collecting fungi. The mold in the shower was trying to tell me but I didn’t listen. Nor did I listen to the ringworm of my patients; but the call to fungi was always there.

Unrated,

CE

Sonnet Sunday: Hunting Mushrooms

Mushroom Hunting

Beware the Fly Amanita, whose cap,
Bright red with yellow spots, practically shouts
Its alkaloids are poison. The Death Cap
Is worse and the Destroying Angel counts
Among the deadliest of mushrooms. Fungi
Are mostly underground, their mushrooms fruit
Of a larger mycelium formed by hyphae.
(The metaphor of the iceberg here would do.)
Mushroom gathering is a risky task.
Avoid anything white with white gills.
Carry a guide book so you can ask
Which fungi’s not accompanied by ills.
A single mushroom is enough for death;
A single fool enough for a last breath.


I just took a three-day break from blogging, not deliberately but because it felt right. And in those brief days I fear my poetic skill has plummeted, as witnessed by this sonnet meant for Sonnet Sunday. Following a little mushroom seminar I attended, Kathleen and I have been hunting mushrooms and we cooked up a couple of Chanterelles the other night which were delicious.

There’s also the deadline for having designed a website, namely today, for my html class. My brain has been like cement but I pulled it together to make some kind of a website. Not entirely primitive but not entirely stylish either.

The increased dose of my new antidepressant seems to be helping me, but I’m not out of the woods yet. Mornings seem to be worst, when I have anxiety and my mind rehearses all its little circles of doom: what I can’t do, what I should do, what I will do and all the rest.

I don’t know if I’m on the road to mental health, since I’ve had quite a few false starts in the last eight months. One can only hope that we got the cocktail right.

Thine,

CE

Triolet: "The Mariner;" Shrink Gives Hope

The Mariner

The Mariner blessed the sea snakes unawares.
They roiled and flamed upon the green glass sea.
(An albatross divided wheat from tares.)
The Mariner blessed the sea snakes unawares.
His dry mouth croaked out penitential prayers,
His penance to re-tell his history.
The Mariner blessed the sea snakes unawares.
They roiled and flamed upon the green glass sea.


My psychiatrist gave me hope yesterday. I had become a little angry and irritable and he said, “A fighting spirit is good.” He changed my medications logically and showed real concern, emphasizing that he would be back from vacation in two weeks and again be available. Kathleen came along and was impressed with him. She opened a discussion about ECT and the doctor promised to look into a facility with a proper protocol and a negotiable payment plan.

All ye that have medical insurance in this country, thank your stars. One third of Americans lack it.

I have always considered “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the two greatest poems in the language. (That they happen to be my favorites may affect my judgment.) Today’s poem is obviously a tribute to “The Rime.”

I forced myself last night to attend an independent publisher’s group, and in putting on my social face I could pretend not to be depressed for the duration. The doctor’s visit and forced socializing did improve my mood for the evening, though before the afternoon appointment with the doctor I was in pretty bad shape.

I will not rate my mood today, but I am feeling marginally better.


Thanks for all the kind encouragement,

CE

Ghazal: Reality Bites; On Self-Esteem

Poems are like Rorschachs and reveal the man within. In “Ode to a Grecian Urn” Keats achieves almost a manic transcendence, while Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” is a dark depiction of a failed romance. In my first Ghazal, then, given my current state of mind, it is not surprising that I dwell on the dark side of reality. Since I chose to submit it to a journal, however, I had to delete it from above. It was called, "Reality Bites."

I go over and over rehearsing in my mind what I will say to my shrink today. I feel a bit ashamed that I have been so public with my disease, almost as if that’s the only thing I’ll be remembered for, though the same can be said of Robert Burton and Kay Jamison. And it is therapeutic to put these things in writing, which helps objectify my plight to myself.

I want to say that “trying” to fight depression only worsens it in my experience; acceptance is all until it passes. If your truck is stuck in the mud, you can spin your wheels or take out a good novel and wait for the mud to dry. You can’t dry the mud yourself. Those who are not manic-depressive tend to overestimate what behavioral changes can do for a deep depression.

Look: I just took a class on mushrooms and went mushroom hunting. I’m in an HTML class where I’m building a website. I start a master gardener program in January. I try to walk an hour a day. I’ve lost a little weight on Kathleen’s high protein diet. I’ve written a poetry review for a major newspaper. I finalized three poetry manuscripts and have them all floating in various contests. I correspond with literary friends. Sometimes I go fishing. I do household chores like vacuuming, the dishes, cooking. I spent a long time nursing a vegetable garden along until October when it essentially died. I give advice to friends and family about their mood disorders. I help take care of our old dog, Kenyon. I pay the bills. I have to plan for medication refills through the net from Canada. I help with shopping. We watch good movies come nightfall. But this little bit is not enough to justify my life. Not even a Pulitzer would justify my life. The question is, why do I feel it necessary to justify my life? Because my self-esteem, especially when depressed, is based on achievement, not loving acceptance. I wish I could change this about myself; when my mood is up I can approach this view. Alas, for now it remains as distant as Antarctica.


Thine in Truth and Art,

C. E. Chaffin

Triolet: Request; mood worsens

Request

Take a stone blade to my hairless chest.
Plunge it in and turn it, find the heart
And cut it wide--you know it’s for the best.
Take a stone blade to my hairless chest.
Carve me a hole where blessed death can nest.
My life was more extraneous than a wart.
Take a stone blade to my hairless chest.
Plunge it in and turn it; find the heart.


I think I’m getting worse. The medications aren’t working. I am near tears much of the time. The noise in my brain is relentless-—snips of song and memory and accusations with a backup chorus of hopelessness, helplessness and worthlessness. I doubled my antipsychotic medicine last night to see if my brain would be any less negatively active, but it did no good. I am on a cocktail of seven medications and they are clearly not working. The new and expensive antidepressant my doctor added two weeks ago has done nothing.

I want to leave this place but I could never do that to my children and wife, who for some strange reason still think my life is worth preserving. They are obviously poor judges of character.

And don’t worry, reader; being suicidal doesn’t mean that I would act on it, because I won’t. That doesn’t stop me for yearning for some fatal disease.


4 Kilorats,

CE

Triolet: Unnatural

I don’t know where today’s triolet comes from. I converted it from a longer free-verse draftwas working on that likely will go nowhere. It is dark, but I had to delete it in order to submit it to a journal. One good thing about form is that you know when you are finished with a poem, more or less, before the last-minute tinkerings.

Kathleen and I found a heap of mushrooms yesterday in the woods around the property. Most of them proved edible, mainly Zeller’s boletes. There was another bolete called a Slippery Jack, but the cap was slimy and the book told us to strip the skin off before cooking. Not easy to strip the skin off of a mushroom. We passed on the slimy shrooms.

I did not wake up feeling rested today and I remembered that if I were to stay up all night it would can provide a temporary reprieve from depression. But I don’t want to do that before my next shrink appointment Wednesday or it may falsely minimize my symptoms. I may do it afterwards; what do I have to lose but a little sleep?


At 3 Kilorats,

CE

Sonnet:: On Love; Kilorat Report

On Love

Let all be done in and for Love.
“All you need is love” John sang--it’s true.
Perhaps not practical, but if you wove
Love into every action, forgetting you,
You might experience a stunning bliss.
The irritating clerk who takes your call
Could be forgiven for her ignorance.
The myriad cracks in your defensive wall
Might be repaired as love helps you accept
The natural limitations of your role.
Attacked, you turn your cheek, strive to protect
The peace, go grab your robe and beggar’s bowl.
Why can't we do this when Love calls us on?
Self-preservation is the Devil’s con.


I had a terrible day yesterday. I tend to wake up OK, but within an hour anxiety starts churning in my stomach and I become afraid. I drag myself through the day, fearing I will not think of anything to do. Yesterday I attended a class on identifying mushrooms and I envied the fungus its peace. Or I would have if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with myself. I hit the bed early, watching UCLA (my alma mater) beat USC for the first time in eight years. Normally I would be happy over the event. But I could only experience the tension of the game, the anxiety about the outcome, and no triumphant emotions visited me after UCLA’s incredible victory. This is called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure.

We truly only experience pleasure when something calls us out of ourselves, a poem, a piece of music that helps us forget ourselves as we merge with the beautiful, the transcendent. This can happen as easily with a nature walk as with a vintage car show. What the thing is doesn’t matter much; it’s the process of transcendence where true joy lies. And in depression this is nearly impossible.

I was buoyed up by my daughters and siblings at Thanksgiving, but my briefly improved spirits were parasitic—they were entirely dependent on the love of others. Back at the ranch I fell into my chemical slough rather quickly. And I hate what it does to Kathleen to see me like this. Last night as I cried she kept saying, “It’s not your fault, you’re sick.” How sick I am can hardly be imagined by those who have not had a serious clinical depression, and many I have talked to who claim to have had a depression have no idea to what depths it can take you.

I tried to write a positive sonnet today nevertheless. My will is ultimately not subject to my mood, not that any act of will can lift me out of it. After college I took a job at a warehouse that was mindless, all I thought I was capable of in that depression. Repetitive physical tasks can be helpful, but when you stop, there you are again.

In any event I plan to go mushroom hunting with Kathleen today and try to employ my new knowledge of fungi. They won’t know that I envy them. O happy fungi!


At 3.5 Kilorats,

CE

Triolet: Primary Colors

Primary Colors

The blue log burned red, red, red.
No one could stop the bitter purple fumes.
The doctor said the fire was in my head.
The blue log burned red, red, red.
What was it that the yellow doctor said?
“Your brain is mulch where the flower of evil blooms.”
The blue log burned red, red, red.
No one could stop the bitter purple fumes.


The triolet is noticeably easier than a villanelle or pantoum. Yes, there is a nod to Baudelaire, and yes, I know the title repeats the title of the book about Clinton’s first campaign. But that doesn’t mean I can’t use the title.

Today we go to a class on mushrooms. Not the psychedelic kind. I wonder, if it’s in lecture format, whether Kathleen will get much out of it. I hope they have slides.

The big USC vs. UCLA game is on today, one of the few football games I watch. My daughter and I went to UCLA; a cousin played for USC. If my dad were alive, we’d be watching it together and rooting against each other. He’s been gone almost twenty years. That’s hard to imagine.

I’m still depressed but I’m trying not to write about it. Each day is a bleak vista I must fill with something. Everything is “ought to,” nothing is “want to.” And I just can’t turn off the noise in my brain unless I’m doing something, like writing. I haven’t played my guitar in I don’t know how many months; I’ve never gone this long before without playing it. Therein lies a story. I took a blues finger-picking guitar seminar some time back. I left the seminar with one small assignment. I couldn’t face the assignment. Thus I haven’t brought my guitar out. I feel if I do, I will have to master the lesson and will not be able to play freely in my own flat-picking style. Sensitivity to failure? Yes. Hopelessness about success? Yes. And failure and success are essentially equal in my present frame of mind. Depression is so Kafkaesque.

Oh, and never trust a depressive when he says, “I’m trying not to write about it.”


Over and out,

Dr. Chaffin

Pantoum: For Jack London

For Jack London

Winter takes no prisoners. It kills.
Death by snow is gentle, a relief.
Too late to cut your dog. His blood spills.
Blood freezes quicker than a thief.

Death by snow is gentle, a relief.
Pull up the sheets of soft white crust.
Blood freezes quicker than a thief.
Maintaining consciousness is a must.

Pull up the sheets of soft white crust.
Your bile and your bones have turned to ice.
Maintaining consciousness is a must.
The cold would fix your brain inside a vise.

Your bile and your bones have turned to ice.
Your parka feels harder than a brick.
The cold would fix your brain inside a vise.
You feel sleepy more than you feel sick.

Your parka feels harder than a brick.
Too late to cut your dog. His blood spills.
You feel sleepy more than you feel sick.
Winter takes no prisoners. It kills.


It's been cold here, though not snowy cold on the coast, but down to the high thirties, why I perhaps wrote this pantoum, which is inspired by Jack London's story, "To Build a Fire."

Pantoums, in my brief reading about them, are quite adaptable. They don't necessarily need to rhyme. Some classicists hold each line should be eight syllables within a rhyme form of ABBA. But few are written so strictly. Other sources say there is no limit on the length of a line, though rhyme should be preserved. There is no limit to how many quatrains you choose to employ. I went with five. I don't know if I'll continue with pantoums, I may throw in a triolet or a ghazal tomorrow. Tomorrow's another day.

As a Laker fan I was happy to see Kobe in the zone last night in the third quarter when he made nine baskets and ten free-throws in a row and scored thirty points. Phil Jackson rested him for most of the 4th quarter. Utah looked tired.

Valerie's comment yesterday I read after today's post; funny that she would think about falling asleep from the cold a day before I wrote on that very subject.


Hope all is well you,

CE