Tag Archives: possibility

Emptiness

11 Aug

I have a preference for emptiness.

Or rather, I have a preference for possibility. The blank space full of a thousand million hundred outcomes, undecided and bubbling with whispers of choices competing for resolution. A blank space is so many finished products, each one undone in perfect construction. No mistakes yet.

Emptiness has a cleanliness to it, a space to breathe with only the dust to tickle your lungs and make you cough, no memory yet to cause that other choking. “This space is yours,” an undressed room will croon. “Put the trappings of yourself here.” No procrastination or dirty laundry miring on the floor, no dividends or odds and ends of life you always meant to get around to. Only life with perfect space for itself there in that blank room, waiting.

Or the winking encouragement of unwritten lines on a notebook page. “What are your words?” the leaves rustle softly to you in invitation. “What murmurs do you hold for us?” Agency and empowerment, all in ink scratched onto blank piece of paper. Your creation. Your word. Your mind. Your world, there for the making.

Blank space in life is a canvas, after all.

I always fear to produce inadequate instruments. What if I pull the strings, tie up the package wrong?

I fear leaving the wrong kinds of cracks and creases.

There is something so sacred, in that first perfect line through emptiness.

Advertisement

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Magick

2 May

 

Magic

I want a world where there are dragons.

I want a world with traveling circuses at night.

I want a world with flying carpets, mermaids, selkies –

where colds, flu, and heartache can be magicked away

with nothing more complicated than some herbs in a pot

and the right words, already written down in a book for you.

In this world of pragmatism,

it’s too hard to know the right words to say.

I want a world with beasts and beauties

requiring no photoshop to recognize,

where illusion makes you think about what life is

instead of trying to convince you the other way around.

I want unicorns,

phoenixes that can rise from ashes and second chances that really matter.

I want the impossible.

I want something more than indeterministic fate.

I want a way to cats-cradle the strings of the universe together

into something better than what it handed me to start with.

I want not the power but the plausible hope

of a world where your will could actually change things.

Where try hard enough and you can succeed,

instead of just the lie they feed you about that here.

I want a world with beautiful rules

and even more beautiful exceptions,

instead of just the shit stochastic

we all give our breath and brains and beatings to.

I want a world where words can fight fists

and win in the moment, there and then.

Words can already bruise people beyond belief

but at least with magic they could provide real safety too.

I want a world with fewer bruises.

I wish more people just hid flowers up their sleeves.

I want a world where more hearts could roar

when they hear that uttered, muttered phrase –

Here be dragons.

I want a world that will offer me greater possibility than this world has to offer

where the only magic that people can ever know –

love, hope, faith, dreaming, a kiss –

is more often that not mere slight of hand and even the best of pixie dust

will end up dead.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Resolution

31 Dec

I’m not really one for the whole “New Year’s Resolution” thing. As someone who’s gone through years and years and more goddamn years of recovery, I’ve seen through myself that change is usually not something that happens through one grand turn around, one definitive pivot. It is a slow, gradual, back and forth of deciding and un-deciding and re-deciding over and over again, until somehow, as each sand grain of nearly unnoticeable tremorous choice has slipped through the infinitesimally small bottleneck of the hourglass of our life, we look up and realize all of a sudden – it’s over. I’ve done it. The sand has all passed through now. And in the struggle of the moment, I didn’t even notice.

It is the second-by-second way we live our life that matters. Sure, change can begin with some grand declaration, but a proclamation is not the same as an action. And as history has shown in coups and diets, monumental momentary revolutions rarely last. Change requires more upkeep than that.

And so with all that in mind, I’ve written my hope for the world as turn the page 2014. A hope not so much for resolution, but for recovery.

possibility

2014

My wish this year, as we turn the page once more,
is that we will embrace a new language for these further pages,
to write a story no longer of the old deadbeat rhythm and rhyme
we have clattered with and clod along, year after year,
but instead a story the sound of which is strange in the ears of life,
the new noise of decisions spoken in a different tongue,
To build the world, not break it.
To grow new life, not gore it.
To turn hope into happening
and loss into learning.
To realize that the chance to change
is not tomorrow but all the yesterdays that were today,
and that with every second the breath of possibility whispers,
“Now.”

Tags: , , , , , , ,