Beginnings (inspired by H. Murakami)

Perhaps there are ways of telling stories that don’t always take off with assuredness, types of stories you can never tell - tracks with trains passing over them that have a mysterious silence all their own.

Maybe the point at which you begin to tell a story is not always the same point at which the story begins, since beginnings are always like this: one minute everything exists – the next minute everything is lost. Yet this may be the beginning you were waiting for, as you watch it swell and grow from nothingness to excess, from dreamy glimpse to solid afterthought, and although you have no idea what is going to happen next, another part of you knows exactly what’s coming as rhythms, words and thinking fall neatly into the arms of a tale so vast, so wide, so alive you immediately run to the window and stick your head out. 

Emptiness as Canvas (with Tania P)

Perhaps the world is a chaos of aches and pains wandering around without knees to inflict; smells that have never known noses; sours apart from their fruits; adjectives bereft of nouns – unattached, adrift, waiting to modify – while within this infinite ceiling of sky with all its stars we huddle within one of eternity’s countless furrows and live like microscopic mites, mostly ignored.

Maybe in the failure of others to notice us, whether omniscient angels we so wish exist or the ordinaries of incarnates, the desire to be seen burgeons the heart past its former borders so its light mingles and ripples along the celestial hem of the Aurora Borealis, no less luminary than the yoni of the candle’s flame in the bedroom defining itself against the diffuse and deepening blues of night.

New Growth

Perhaps while on the outside your daily life appears consistent and secure – a thick, branching angled stem held rigid and upright against the frosty sparkle of a new snow, another life is going on inside you. A longing that shines from the slanting rays of a cold sun invades your tidy routines as desire sprouts up in crevices of memory long since abandoned by your cultivated outlook.

Maybe as each encased, spiraling tuft of what lies dormant is invited to sprout, triggered by an undetectable clock, the twining stems of its foliage gives you a clue; and while cutting back the roots may temporarily weaken the impulse, it may also promote new shoots.