“Backwards and forwards,” the laughter, followed by deep breaths, for long durations there had been nothing else. My half-assed dreams were the only piece of me left intact, or that I was able to find in my unanimated demeanor.
I sometimes felt like a peddler of three lonely words, carried by a broken down glory on the back of painful memories. Though, it is suffice to say that the experience of my sporadic cycles have been both essential and delightful in regards to the overall growth of me.
Over in the corner, on the darkest fringe of awareness, the light still lingers; and in a flash of two memories colliding, my sensitivity to the light has somehow improved.
In the beginning brightness had been all over the place and everywhere the same. It was a shining spectrum of silence, boundless but uniform.
Essentially, it was without flaw, still indeterminate. And yet, while It remains all that it has forever been, it was as though the gentleness of bliss had been limited to the interpretation of an activity.
Poetry.
The first time I finagled with the rhythm of rhyme, I felt like my soul was bouncing all over the place. Funny enough, it was when I first stepped off a plane in Colorado with the second cut by my side some twenty three years odd years ago.
It is true that every movement in genuine love is poetic, if not absolutely hallucinogenic.
But this is how I thought of poetry over the next few years though. I was determined to stabilize myself with an exercise in spiritual growth and self-recollection with a tight grip on the adolescent lessons layered with love and loss, all the while doing it with a smile.
I felt that the aim of writing poetry would help to saturate the deserted depths of my lonely arid soul, only to revive the active connection between my true self and the divine powers that be, those that are much greater than me.
I felt that it helped to heal — not only me, but maybe others too. And I realized that the art of poetry was, as it is that follows.
The Art Itself
Poetry is an evolution of the soul that is at the same time patterned in reality, a kind of living lattice of discovery; universal, infinitely complex, and exquisitely delicate. A vast web of knots and divergences, of parallels and spirals, of cycles and constant rebirths, of intricate figures and their curiously distorted projections—all shining, active, and most importantly in love and alive with its unspoken healing power.
It was from then on though, that first written rhyme that I wanted to drape the world in the radiance of poetry, but I didn’t have enough material, nor the confidence to boot. My first attempt ended somewhere back in my early twenties between my head and my heart.
Sure, poetry was lovely and generous, with all of its endless serenity. Even still, its goodness was the sort of goodness society had long considered out of date, so I gave it all up, and chased my own tail instead.
Besides, the radiance I wanted to deal in was an antiquated kind, and in short supply throughout this shallow world.
What I needed was a newfound radiance altogether, something with a little more rhythm, more gorgeous and chivalrous, so that life wouldn’t allow my imagination the time to pine away in the darkness of all the deep-seated pain.
My imagination had to assert itself so that the art manifested the healing powers from my own inward nature, that which is stubborn to a fault, but I did, I had to fall in love with myself and the art, to prove to myself that I still had a heart.
The Heart & Soul Of Me
Without leaving himself, a man grows with the vastness of the cosmic scope within him; and yet: the farther he sometimes goes, the less about himself, he really knows.
Now, is poetry something that has the power to pick you up in Atlanta, Georgia and land you in sunny California a few hours and cocktails later?
Is it able validate the distance between ourselves, and that, which lies ahead of us?
Some think it has no such power. And nowadays public interest seems to only grow wherever power does.
In the days of old though, poetry was a force to be fucking reckoned with. The poet had real romantic strength in the material world. Though of course, the material was much different then, it was more or less feather pen inkwells and hand me down scrolls.
Back then, the human soul was still able to be wrapped up in the fabric of such linguistic magic. All the way up until the Industrial age slithered its greed around the heart and soul of mankind. And that was when the poets had to go into hiding, because universal love took a back seat to industrial power.
Still though, the romantic poets of societies old influence had always done what they were expected to do without the burden of constant expectation. They simply sprinkled beauty amongst the chaos, only to eventually give in to the hellbent pursuit of everything lustfully imperceptible.
They chased ruin and death harder than they chased women. They set their talent ablaze, followed by a mental decline just before they reached home plate, only to slide headfirst down a slippery slope into their own booze barrel of a grave, aged with death and soaked in love.
And if I may speak honestly, I do believe society is very proud of its dead poets.
Most everyone takes tremendous satisfaction in the poet’s self-taught, slightly underhanded testimony that reality is too tough, too big, too damn much; too awfully rigid with an expectation that bounces off the emotional checks and balances of a cast iron soul.
It is often thought that to be a poet is an elementary school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of an unhinged spiritual prowess was provoked by the childishness, the madness, and the drunkenness, much to the delight of the inner demons of such poetically marvelous martyrs!
But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I do not intend to do...
So poets are loved, but loved just because they just can’t make it here in the real world, or so they say.
We exist to loosen the grip on the feelings of harsh experience by unraveling the tangled knots of a painful life. And in all reality, scribbling poetic meaning over the inconsistencies of life, is a whole lot easier than actually living it.
We are here to justify the cynicism of the hard-hearted men who say, “If I weren’t such a corrupt, unemotional piece of work, I couldn’t get through these times either. Look at these good, tenderhearted men, the best of us. The poor bastards perished by their own weakness for what they cannot see, crazy sons of bitches.”
And just as well, all the same, the desire of a poet will at times intersect at the crossroads of contradiction within himself.
Maybe it’s an urge to be magically and cosmically expressive in the shadows of everything articulate, or, to be able to approximate almost anything.
Or possibly it’s to be wise, philosophical, to find that common ground between the beauty of words, women, spirituality, love, sex, desire, chemistry, God, and science. To prove that the animated passionate emotions of a spiritually poetic imagination are just as potent as any well-oiled war machine.
Or it could just be to believe in an unforeseen ability to free one from one's conditioned self, and offer his heart to humanity with an unconditional love that spills from the light hidden in the calvary above.
The Truth Is
But all the same, there in the shadows of his drive and desire, hides an inkling of expectation to be famous, and in this expectation of fame, there always hides a muse.
A woman. There was always a damn woman behind the scenes.
Of course, it always came down to women.
But a poet’s first obligation should not necessarily be women, nor is it to perform metaphoric open heart surgery on the wounds of humanity. Everyone's got a stake in the husbandry of humanity, but language is a poet’s main obligation, and what a grandiose beast it is. Because if it weren’t for language there would be no such thing as society.
And once a poet establishes this commitment to all things linguistic, by taking the risks that the relationship between his head and heart demands, then he is free to move about the cabin as he pleases. They are then free to promote social betterment to the extent that their consciousness is capable.
See, the poet’s great adventure is to establish the evolution of consciousness, maybe even just his own. But we are here to help enlarge the soul of society, to liberate the broken spirits, and light up your mind from the bottom of our hearts, and maybe even light up our own darkness too.
That’s why the world will always romanticize its love for poets, simply because of their ability to turn all of the pain into something beautiful that the world has never seen.
This is the bittersweet truth when it comes to the art of poetry.
“Upwards and upright,” I whisper to myself silenced by a sudden glorified onslaught of distant laughter.
Again, a few more softly lit fragments of myself fall back to me—the same as they always were, but in some way associated, this time, with a particular light in the bright lattice of an intricate relationship, right in between what is right and what is wrong, smack dab in the middle of me.
It lights up approximately at that infinite little point of intersecting alignment that shines at the core of all souls.
This pattern of intersection often projects itself onto another upwards pattern, and within the other pattern I find another, larger fragment of me—a long lost memoir as a boy, scrambling out of the puddles of an adolescent ditch, wet and muddy up to my knees in a stream of poetry.
I shout at the shadow of the older man above. “Just jump you chicken shit. Just jump and get it over with.” And as the shadow jumps, a faint howl echoes through me with laughter.
An indeterminable voice within my immediate surroundings introduces itself as gentle as possible to my half asleep and contemplative state, startling both me, and my thought process wide awake.
“Dad, wake up. You’re laughing and talking in your dreams again,” says my son tapping me on the shoulder.
Then, the pilot chimes in overhead.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated and fasten your seatbelts, flight attendants please see that all tray tables are folded upwards and seat backs are in the upright position, and that all emotional baggage is put away properly and overhead bins are secure. We are clear for takeoff.”
In the end, it is somewhat true that a poet cannot perform societal open heart surgery on the wounds of humanity, nor can he heave a mechanical bird of shiny steel, thirty three thousand feet in the air at three hundred and thirty-three miles per hour, only to land soft, gentle, and safe in good ole sunny California.
But he can damn sure die trying.
Til the next time.
Yours Truly,
Ryan Love
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