needs quiet
from time to time
A place apart from others
a temple of solitude where weight
of the world is lifted from our shoulders
With a mailbox at least a few miles distant
The moss begins to gather on the hinges
we realize we owe a debt for our lives
Psychics, songwriter’s can’t explain
how to find the way to this orb
Science and poets explain
real meanings of life
empty stampedes
explore destiny
A hollow space
free from the dust
of a million frantic feet
The noisier a life becomes
The harder it is to find quiet
places dignified and refined
Perhaps the less one has
the more one can gain
from the experience
Philosophy’s tools
navigate crowds
of life by ourselves
Our breathing is enough
to chart a course in a journey
It is good that the wisest find this place
There isn’t room enough for everyone to be alone
The one who requires the least ultimately wins solitude
Sam and me, dog and man, enjoy our solitude together as often as we can find it. We took an after-lunch stroll down to the pond to see who’s there and what they’re up to.
We wound through cypress, pine, cedar and more maples to get down to the pond, my favorite spot on the property.
Every year the pond grows more lush, more sublime…the vegetation, now waist and shoulder-high displaces the carpet of native ferns, dug up and transplanted to the front of the property along the fence.
Digging the pond was the first landscaping project I attacked after I built the ranch house, and its where the best quality of solitude can be found.
A few years ago the area was no more than a tangled piece of woods…probably a lightening hit blew the dank, featureless woods into the bog that’s now a pond.
A quiet place to get away from it all.
Fresh from what I thought was to be my final deployment my new property was my kingdom. Sam, my brand-new half-wolf pup was to be my chief lieutenant, my right hand man.
The pond was the first project we started after we moved in. One bright Saturday morning a flatbed truck pulled up the driveway and unloaded a backhoe, which churned down the ancient rail winding through the mostly untouched forest toward the Sound.
Dust plumes hung fat tires and hung unsteadily in the air. Centuries old, the trail hadn’t suffered a vehicle for decades until the greasy, gnarling insect-like machine roamed through the stately, mature forest on its way to the bog.
The machine paused at a soggy spot in the trail where a tiny spring trickled into the bog. In lieu of a path a raggy collection of boards and branches kept me from sinking into the slop.
Agile, powerful, the backhoe lunged and retreated. A claw on one end ripped at the earth near the muckhole. A bucket on the opposite scooped the torn earth and dumped it in a neat pile at the edge of the cedars
Churling, grinding and snarling, it snapped roots, scooped up rocks, tore with its claw at the tender vegetation that remained after the ferns were transplanted. It proved itself a wrecker of things.
As the sun edged the low horizon and the light grew weary, the backhoe spun around and disappeared up the trail and back to the truck.
It left a hole capacious enough to contain the monster that created it, as though the machine, limited to industrial logic and hopelessly dependent on petroleum, could perceive its own demise.
A hole in the ground will eventually attract something, due mostly to the simple laws of gravity. The hole collected rainwater and debris, and over a few years the trickling spring filled the hole up to its stagnant brim, burying the muck and clutter below.
The mound that rimmed the murky pond held the darkest soil from the deepest part of the hole, yielding the richest color, like ground cocoa.
The mound around the rim sprouted immediately, and over time the pond’s turgid water cleared, its contents settled to the bottom and rime became a shore, of sorts.
Naked soil grew resplendent with plants, shrubs and saplings, every empty area jammed with burgeoning iceplant.
The pond morphed slowly from a soggy visual nuisance to a glorious Eden, brimming with life, noise and color at the end of the trail.
Today, a trickle runs from the pond’s mossy lip and disappears into the woods. Lillies float on the surface, squirrels sun their fat bellies while birds bring daily offerings to the mounded shore encircling the translucent, green water. Sleek orange and red koi slide elegantly below.
Seems now the pond has always occupied its present rarified territory. Mayhaps a roaming brontosaurus could have paused to tilt for a drink one afternoon in this lush place of peaceful contemplation, oasis for hundreds of living things born from the air.
They came and went, they come and go…some stay longer than others, but always the strong survive. The pond has become proof of life, a scratch in the earth infected with vigor and flourish.
Me and Sam sat on the shore and stared into the water. I think Sam was studying his reflection, a well-earned case of canine narcissism, if you ask me. He seemed pleased.
The heat, rare any time of year, began to build, casting a pall that slowed slightly the pace of every living creature…except the annoying ones.
A ladybug buzzed lazily along a low trajectory through the trees when it spied the pond and circled to reconnoiter the area. It cast a tiny shadow over a knot of striders, spiderlike insects skittering across the pond’s surface.
The whole tribe snapped to attention, spoiling for combat.
As me and Sam gazed thoughtlessly into the pond, the ladybug slammed into the water on its back. From a strategic standpoint, the ladybug was in about the worst place possible, splayed on her back, stuck helplessly in the water, half-submerged and completely confused.
The striders jumped, almost in unison…a hoary mass of long, sticklike legs.
The mightiest of the crew siezed first upon the ladybug and held it with several legs while fending off hungry sisters with several others. Her remaining legs struggled toward the shore and strategic advantage.
There, in a brilliant display of Amazon multitasking, the warrior bug snapped legs at the joints, ripped heads clean off fat, shiny bodies as she beat back the mob and dragged her drowning dinner into the iceplant and enfilade, a more defensible position.
The battled raged, though the striders grew weary as their bodies dried in the unusually warm sun. Soon, the ladybug regained its breath, and flexed its wings inside the strider’s many grips.
The ladybug broke free and soared off into the evening sky in a widening circle that flattened out toward the Sound.
The strider tribe stood motionless for a moment or two, then strode collectively across the water and collected in a knot at the opposite shore of the pond in the shadow of a stately and benign century-old Spruce, undisturbed through the proceedings of a long, slow life.
Sam and me were thinking the same thing.
My life, on the other hand, has hardly been slow, and only relatively dignified. It is somewhat quiet now, thanks to continual diligence and keeping aware of my limitations. It wasn’t always like this.
After I left Poaster’s joint I got on my feet and moved into my own place. In time my physical wounds healed, but I fell more deeply infatuated with Tara Vinson then I would have planned. The one limitation for which I had never prepared.
It was weird to be alone in my new place, away from my regular life.
“Look at this cave I’ve made for myself.” My TaraTemple.
I pawed drool from my lip and stared with swollen eyes at the stolen woman plastering blue carpeted walls. I sat for days at a time in an old rocking chair talking to myself while Americas Most Wanted stared gloomily back at me.
A framed, halogen Pocahontas, a feather in her braids, gazed wistfully from a rock by a waterfall, trapped in innocence by the predations of the long lost artist.
The dancing girl in a grass skirt on a ceramic vase of dead lillies shimmied grimly in her tease. Chante Moore’s placid face hung from the cover of her CD jewel box.
Chante, earth mother, how could I have loved you a little without loving you a lot?
And my accordion…Lord, you’ve got to be devoted to play the squeezebox. I’d been dragging it around for years. I spent weeks composing a waltz for Tara Vinson on that thing, figuring one day She’ll be older and might be interested. For sure, one day She’ll seem older.
You know, we read something like Moby Dick and wonder what makes a guy so crazy…who would start something that can’t ever be finished?
I knew my problem, but hid it with words, being a cunning, lingual, cannibaldude, unstrapped by verisimilitude, trapped in my chair, lost within Her stare, no sense left to impair, listening alone to the dream only I could hear.
I had no plans to out-dick Moby, sitting in that chair, just wanted to sit there, listening to Her stare. Confronting my Other, a struggle to finish the start at the altar of my ego, the Mother of my art.
I talked to the walls, they spoke to me, my anodyne set me free. It was a game I played, one cautious, fatal move at a time with no second chance.
Every thought I had was to salve The Muse. The touch of passion known forever to hurt so much prevented me from loving, from feeling, from my duty and service, prevented me from myself.
The Other was always beyond my reach. It was an inspired game, nothing more, plotted hopefully to deliver The Muse from my soul.
A union of one mind aching to create a whole.
And then the bugs came, the ants for what food remained, the flies for me.
They were everywhere in that public house of mine, their steady drone accompanied the sinking of my heart. They darkened the food the ants methodically hauled away, no longer fit even for me.
Every time I made a move I’d disturb one in flight.
They fucked constantly, mocking me who could not. They offered their steady drone in consolation, hoping to seduce me while I bored away my time.
They didn’t want to drive me away, yet they knew I couldn’t leave. They tried to seduce me with their steady drone, waiting only to bury their eggs in my rotting corpse.
I heard a knock on my double-locked door one day, but as usual, didn’t bother to get up to answer.
It was Cloris, who let herself in. Professionally. Quietly. If she hadn’t worked for the agency for so long, she may never have found me.
It took her a minute to deal with the fact that I thought she was Tara Vinson, but she got over it. She hauled me out of there, cleaned me up and got me back into the trade. We shipped to Bosnia together and into a new war. Still over petroleum, of course, but with sorry religious overtones.
You can take a man out of The Crusades, but its much harder to take The Crusades out of the man.
Men always have motives for war. It’s a Greek thing. A suicide bomber is acting out from a deep sexual psychosis and probably a lousy diet.
Hate itself is a twisted manifestation of sexuality. Hate is joined at the hip with Fear, which is the very ink of most religious doctrine.
That dark fear is part of humanity may never fade away. The soldiers of Fear are diseased people who can no longer manage their lives, so must destroy all hope of peace.
Bottom line: men can’t keep their hands off each other.
The man-hungry soldiers of Islam promise to keep us busy from here on out. They’ll keep us occupied until we’re all dead. Freud was, of course, right. More right than Buddha, more right than Jesus, more right than Mohammad.
Men willingly die to impress each other.
They don’t die for their countries any more, they die for ideas. Marketing ideas controlled by Capitalists. No matter how much people suffer, the Capitalists always win.
There is always profit in loss.
Sam came over, settled down and lay his muzzle on my knee. He sensed things were a little dark for me, what with Poaster’s demise opening a flood of unsolicited memories.
I thought I heard Sam suggest we go up to the house for a drink and a snack. That snapped me out of my funk, and I congratulated him for his perspicacity, his compassion and evincing wit. A hell of a dog, a natural-born killer.
I gave him a scratch. His favorite reward.
We wound through cypress, pine, cedar and more maples to get down to the pond, my favorite spot on the property.
Every year the pond grows more lush, more sublime…the vegetation, now waist and shoulder-high displaces the carpet of native ferns, dug up and transplanted to the front of the property along the fence.
Digging the pond was the first landscaping project I attacked after I built the ranch house, and its where the best quality of solitude can be found.
A few years ago the area was no more than a tangled piece of woods…probably a lightening hit blew the dank, featureless woods into the bog that’s now a pond.
A quiet place to get away from it all.
Fresh from what I thought was to be my final deployment my new property was my kingdom. Sam, my brand-new half-wolf pup was to be my chief lieutenant, my right hand man.
The pond was the first project we started after we moved in. One bright Saturday morning a flatbed truck pulled up the driveway and unloaded a backhoe, which churned down the ancient rail winding through the mostly untouched forest toward the Sound.
Dust plumes hung fat tires and hung unsteadily in the air. Centuries old, the trail hadn’t suffered a vehicle for decades until the greasy, gnarling insect-like machine roamed through the stately, mature forest on its way to the bog.
The machine paused at a soggy spot in the trail where a tiny spring trickled into the bog. In lieu of a path a raggy collection of boards and branches kept me from sinking into the slop.
Agile, powerful, the backhoe lunged and retreated. A claw on one end ripped at the earth near the muckhole. A bucket on the opposite scooped the torn earth and dumped it in a neat pile at the edge of the cedars
Churling, grinding and snarling, it snapped roots, scooped up rocks, tore with its claw at the tender vegetation that remained after the ferns were transplanted. It proved itself a wrecker of things.
As the sun edged the low horizon and the light grew weary, the backhoe spun around and disappeared up the trail and back to the truck.
It left a hole capacious enough to contain the monster that created it, as though the machine, limited to industrial logic and hopelessly dependent on petroleum, could perceive its own demise.
A hole in the ground will eventually attract something, due mostly to the simple laws of gravity. The hole collected rainwater and debris, and over a few years the trickling spring filled the hole up to its stagnant brim, burying the muck and clutter below.
The mound that rimmed the murky pond held the darkest soil from the deepest part of the hole, yielding the richest color, like ground cocoa.
The mound around the rim sprouted immediately, and over time the pond’s turgid water cleared, its contents settled to the bottom and rime became a shore, of sorts.
Naked soil grew resplendent with plants, shrubs and saplings, every empty area jammed with burgeoning iceplant.
The pond morphed slowly from a soggy visual nuisance to a glorious Eden, brimming with life, noise and color at the end of the trail.
Today, a trickle runs from the pond’s mossy lip and disappears into the woods. Lillies float on the surface, squirrels sun their fat bellies while birds bring daily offerings to the mounded shore encircling the translucent, green water. Sleek orange and red koi slide elegantly below.
Seems now the pond has always occupied its present rarified territory. Mayhaps a roaming brontosaurus could have paused to tilt for a drink one afternoon in this lush place of peaceful contemplation, oasis for hundreds of living things born from the air.
They came and went, they come and go…some stay longer than others, but always the strong survive. The pond has become proof of life, a scratch in the earth infected with vigor and flourish.
Me and Sam sat on the shore and stared into the water. I think Sam was studying his reflection, a well-earned case of canine narcissism, if you ask me. He seemed pleased.
The heat, rare any time of year, began to build, casting a pall that slowed slightly the pace of every living creature…except the annoying ones.
A ladybug buzzed lazily along a low trajectory through the trees when it spied the pond and circled to reconnoiter the area. It cast a tiny shadow over a knot of striders, spiderlike insects skittering across the pond’s surface.
The whole tribe snapped to attention, spoiling for combat.
As me and Sam gazed thoughtlessly into the pond, the ladybug slammed into the water on its back. From a strategic standpoint, the ladybug was in about the worst place possible, splayed on her back, stuck helplessly in the water, half-submerged and completely confused.
The striders jumped, almost in unison…a hoary mass of long, sticklike legs.
The mightiest of the crew siezed first upon the ladybug and held it with several legs while fending off hungry sisters with several others. Her remaining legs struggled toward the shore and strategic advantage.
There, in a brilliant display of Amazon multitasking, the warrior bug snapped legs at the joints, ripped heads clean off fat, shiny bodies as she beat back the mob and dragged her drowning dinner into the iceplant and enfilade, a more defensible position.
The battled raged, though the striders grew weary as their bodies dried in the unusually warm sun. Soon, the ladybug regained its breath, and flexed its wings inside the strider’s many grips.
The ladybug broke free and soared off into the evening sky in a widening circle that flattened out toward the Sound.
The strider tribe stood motionless for a moment or two, then strode collectively across the water and collected in a knot at the opposite shore of the pond in the shadow of a stately and benign century-old Spruce, undisturbed through the proceedings of a long, slow life.
Sam and me were thinking the same thing.
My life, on the other hand, has hardly been slow, and only relatively dignified. It is somewhat quiet now, thanks to continual diligence and keeping aware of my limitations. It wasn’t always like this.
After I left Poaster’s joint I got on my feet and moved into my own place. In time my physical wounds healed, but I fell more deeply infatuated with Tara Vinson then I would have planned. The one limitation for which I had never prepared.
It was weird to be alone in my new place, away from my regular life.
“Look at this cave I’ve made for myself.” My TaraTemple.
I pawed drool from my lip and stared with swollen eyes at the stolen woman plastering blue carpeted walls. I sat for days at a time in an old rocking chair talking to myself while Americas Most Wanted stared gloomily back at me.
A framed, halogen Pocahontas, a feather in her braids, gazed wistfully from a rock by a waterfall, trapped in innocence by the predations of the long lost artist.
The dancing girl in a grass skirt on a ceramic vase of dead lillies shimmied grimly in her tease. Chante Moore’s placid face hung from the cover of her CD jewel box.
Chante, earth mother, how could I have loved you a little without loving you a lot?
And my accordion…Lord, you’ve got to be devoted to play the squeezebox. I’d been dragging it around for years. I spent weeks composing a waltz for Tara Vinson on that thing, figuring one day She’ll be older and might be interested. For sure, one day She’ll seem older.
You know, we read something like Moby Dick and wonder what makes a guy so crazy…who would start something that can’t ever be finished?
I knew my problem, but hid it with words, being a cunning, lingual, cannibaldude, unstrapped by verisimilitude, trapped in my chair, lost within Her stare, no sense left to impair, listening alone to the dream only I could hear.
I had no plans to out-dick Moby, sitting in that chair, just wanted to sit there, listening to Her stare. Confronting my Other, a struggle to finish the start at the altar of my ego, the Mother of my art.
I talked to the walls, they spoke to me, my anodyne set me free. It was a game I played, one cautious, fatal move at a time with no second chance.
Every thought I had was to salve The Muse. The touch of passion known forever to hurt so much prevented me from loving, from feeling, from my duty and service, prevented me from myself.
The Other was always beyond my reach. It was an inspired game, nothing more, plotted hopefully to deliver The Muse from my soul.
A union of one mind aching to create a whole.
And then the bugs came, the ants for what food remained, the flies for me.
They were everywhere in that public house of mine, their steady drone accompanied the sinking of my heart. They darkened the food the ants methodically hauled away, no longer fit even for me.
Every time I made a move I’d disturb one in flight.
They fucked constantly, mocking me who could not. They offered their steady drone in consolation, hoping to seduce me while I bored away my time.
They didn’t want to drive me away, yet they knew I couldn’t leave. They tried to seduce me with their steady drone, waiting only to bury their eggs in my rotting corpse.
I heard a knock on my double-locked door one day, but as usual, didn’t bother to get up to answer.
It was Cloris, who let herself in. Professionally. Quietly. If she hadn’t worked for the agency for so long, she may never have found me.
It took her a minute to deal with the fact that I thought she was Tara Vinson, but she got over it. She hauled me out of there, cleaned me up and got me back into the trade. We shipped to Bosnia together and into a new war. Still over petroleum, of course, but with sorry religious overtones.
You can take a man out of The Crusades, but its much harder to take The Crusades out of the man.
Men always have motives for war. It’s a Greek thing. A suicide bomber is acting out from a deep sexual psychosis and probably a lousy diet.
Hate itself is a twisted manifestation of sexuality. Hate is joined at the hip with Fear, which is the very ink of most religious doctrine.
That dark fear is part of humanity may never fade away. The soldiers of Fear are diseased people who can no longer manage their lives, so must destroy all hope of peace.
Bottom line: men can’t keep their hands off each other.
The man-hungry soldiers of Islam promise to keep us busy from here on out. They’ll keep us occupied until we’re all dead. Freud was, of course, right. More right than Buddha, more right than Jesus, more right than Mohammad.
Men willingly die to impress each other.
They don’t die for their countries any more, they die for ideas. Marketing ideas controlled by Capitalists. No matter how much people suffer, the Capitalists always win.
There is always profit in loss.
Sam came over, settled down and lay his muzzle on my knee. He sensed things were a little dark for me, what with Poaster’s demise opening a flood of unsolicited memories.
I thought I heard Sam suggest we go up to the house for a drink and a snack. That snapped me out of my funk, and I congratulated him for his perspicacity, his compassion and evincing wit. A hell of a dog, a natural-born killer.
I gave him a scratch. His favorite reward.
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