Prayer Yen

Only
when the wind rattles the tree
do seeds fall
hair tumbles, shoulders;
leaves, the road--
roll, catch, and they break like
glass underfoot.  It is fall.  I say to myself
that it is okay to wait
for what to do with the rest of today
indoors, watch bread in the oven womb
swelling and sunflower seeds pop
from the crust
I only wanted to see
if I could do it,
face it.

The streets are fairly tales only when
roving their nipping air; I
see their too many breaths
sticking against the windows that I
peer into--
their afternoons and the hot water
for tea or coffee with
animal frequency, shriveled
orange peels curling
into themselves like
frightened worms and
"the cake has been served
and did you like it?"
Trying to fit in but the key
in the door always in the door a
sore tooth turning and turning and
from in there the rain runs itself
sideways into the mouth of an
earth one would never see.
The leaves might as well be licked
down for good.

In Navajo mythology,
rain is the sun's sperm.
These days, there's no dance
for birth, regeneration, death,
until there's true fear under our feet--
the snake in the dream bites
two eagles making love in free fall
don't make it
maybe
our wind couldn't
catch them.

They used to look at the sky
and see Gods.

What do we see?

What it Takes to Build a Car

he doesn't eat breakfast and
he is losing his hair,
he bets on soccer matches during the breaks and
he became terrified of having children and death at age twelve,
he wears a t-shirt that reads "blaze kush" and
he has 14 siblings,
he wants to become chief and
he likes his beer cold,
he wakes up at 3:30 every morning to get here on time and
he laughs deep from within his big belly,
he spent four years in prison for brutalizing a police officer and
he promises her that she is the girl of his dreams on the phone,
he still lives at his parents place and
he stopped drinking but not smoking,
he walks with a bit of a limp and
he has a tongue piercing,
he lowers his head and does the work all while he is learning
to fit in.

September

they have been

naming this

season after

the man i see

picking the apples

at the crown of my

family tree; naming

it with the

quivering hand

of those who have

spent whole

afternoons of their

childhood staring

into the sun,

and now see

a small black hole

boring into

everything they

hold in their

sight (those who know

there is no going

back).  that man bites

into the crisp

apples of this my

tree and crunches

them deliberately like

rocks--- they were

made for him and him

only.  That man

wears slacks with a

tear along the

left leg from a dog

that caught him

stealing apples from

another tree.

the waters are churning. 

the waters are coiling as if

someone had just

left them so
how to enter them?  
and

because they didnt ask for
names when we

applied for this

world, how to

go about introducing oneself

to the lights falling

and fading all around,

those burning

out to a certain

stillness i see

in the black dots on

the eyes of those leaving

the water right

in front of me

Peaks

Let what I've been seeing go lucid, go day out of night.  Develop, as they say.  But it's more than just plastic and chemicals, I say.  North Sea, Ireland, Paris, farm, heide, her--- a few.  The rest are still little mysteries in a box somewhere in the new spot.

In the meantime, been reading a bit... here's how they've been talking:

East Coker V  (excerpt)

Home is where one starts. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot ~

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

~ Ted Kooser ~

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs -

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

Stoking

Getting ready for new business ventures...

See!?!?????!!?!

Read this today on Facebook, and am totally going to rip the entire thing off because I think that it's incredibly important, mostly how ridiculously expensive education has become (and my friends here in Germany/Europe in general get pissed when they have to pay more than 150 Euros in tuition a semester)....


"DUMB ARGUMENT FROM BABY BOOMERS: “Millennials are so lazy and rely on their parents too much! When I was in college, I worked hard. I worked almost full-time while attending school full-time, and I put myself through college all on my own on minimum wage! It wasn’t easy, but I did it! I graduated with no debt. All of these young people feel entitled to a college education but don’t want to put in the work. Why can’t they just pony up and do what I did?”

SHORT REBUTTAL FROM A 21-YEAR-OLD: “It’s literally impossible.”

LONG ANSWER: Let me break it down for you. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average cost of a public four-year university during the 1977-1978 school year broke down as such:

Tuition - $1,291
Dormitories - $654
Books - $148 (This figure was found by taking the average books/supplies cost of 2014, which has risen 812% since 1978, and doing the math to find the original cost).
Adjusted for inflation, this comes out to a total cost of about $8,203 per year in 2014 dollars.

Now, for the 2014-2015 school year at ASU (an average public, four-year university), using my own billing history from the university, the cost broke down like this:
In-State Tuition - $10,156
Dormitories - $10,394
Fees - ~$5,000
Books - $1200
Total cost: $26,750

Cool. So, even counting inflation, that’s a 233% increase in total cost. So about that minimum wage.
In 1978, the federal minimum wage was $2.30. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $9.03.
In 2014, the federal minimum wage is $7.25… which would have about $1.99 purchasing power in 1978. Just pointing out that our current minimum wage is worth less than it was in 1978.

A full-time student, on average, takes 15 credit hours per semester. As we all know, for every hour spent in class, you’re expected to complete two hours of homework outside of class. There’s 45 hours a week already occupied with schoolwork, or nine hours each weekday.

Let’s say your class/homework schedule on weekdays was 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. That’s cool, though. You’re a hard worker. You are determined to get through school with as little debt as possible, so you work every day after school from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and each weekend from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., for a total of 38 hours a week. (Your boss won’t hire you full-time because if you work 40 hours a week, they’ll have to provide you with icky, expensive things like health insurance and benefits and PTO! Boo!)

Assuming this is your schedule for both semesters (32 weeks), you work 1,216 hours per school year.
In 1978, this would have earned you $87.40 per week for a grand total of $2,790 per school year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $10,207. WOAH. Your total college costs were $8,203! I mean, you’ll probably have to work for a little bit more after you graduate to pay back some of the debt, but you’re just about golden. Your total income exceeded your total billing statement. Congratulations, dude(tte)! 1977-1978 was really good to you.

But it’s 2014! If you worked 38 hours a week at minimum wage, you’d earn only $8,816 per school year. Considering your total school bill was over $26,000, things aren’t looking too good for you. But wait, you say - I’ll just work more! Hey, good for you for taking the initiative, kid. But to cover you school bill by working a minimum-wage job, you’d have to work 3,690 hours per school year. That comes out to 115 hours of work per week. The allotted hours dedicated to schoolwork add another 45 hours each work, coming out to 160 hours per week. Do you know how many hours there are in a week? 168. That gives you roughly one hour a day that you’re not working or going to school. One hour.

If you only wanted to work 38 hours a week and pay off your bill, you’d have to earn roughly $22 per hour. If you, as a 20-something college student, can find a job that will hire you for $22 per hour and let you work nights and weekends that doesn’t involve anything degrading or illegal, hook a sister up.
Of course, these costs are just for school – they don’t include things like food, gas, bills, healthcare, entertainment, etc. So, in reality, you’d have to work way, way harder to survive. At minimum wage, you literally wouldn’t be able to every single hour of a week and still come out of college debt-free. Oh, you wanna talk about private institutions? I DON’T. Because that’s too much math. Rest assured though, it’s worse than everything you’ve read here so far.

Here’s a quick note about financial aid: I’m lucky enough to have received a scholarship that covers my tuition and a grant that gives me about $5,000 a year to go toward my costs. Assuming someone had the same financial aid situation as I do, they’d have to work 50 hours a week on minimum wage, or 38 hours a week at $9.50. That’s definitely far, faaaar more manageable - BUT it’s laughable to assume that you’d get to stow away every penny of that to go toward debt. Y’all need groceries. Y’all need to pay electricity bills. Y’all need to pay the internet bill. Y’all need to go to the doctor. Y’all need to pay for gas or public transportation. By the end of your two weeks, it’s not uncommon to find that your bank account is running on empty.

The notion that we don’t work hard when it comes to helping to pay off our college education is outdated and unfounded. I don’t think I know anyone my age who isn’t working – and if they aren’t, it’s because they have hella rich parents and can do whatever they want forever."

Today

How I was wanting to think...

Picnic, Lightning

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.

~ Billy Collins ~

Took Me

Steve McCurry: A Retrospective from Leica Camera on Vimeo.

Nicht Zu Fassen

Untitled

Dripping veins of the greenhouse

Flowing to first light, light gone

Chamomile and honeying dew drops into

Gold flakes for my morning eyes, eyes

Still coming to. Eyes quivering from the

Inside, unable to sit still like the wheelbarrow

Half a belly full of water and

Rusting for it. Eyes that see how

The root of red beet gathers dirt to it

In bunches like a wedding dress,

Then pushes up into the sky.

See but dont quite know how,

Or what, to do once they

Root themselves in another—

And when to harvest

The jagged blooms in your eyes?

Still, the seasons song revolves

Everlong, as do the changes

In us. I know this when, on the

Other side of day, the sky at nine is a

Royal pink heart, tissues gently pulsing—

It tells me to trust my own.

It tells me that I already know when

To plant, when to let fields lay

Fallow to think over themselves. That

I alone know when to be the

Sunset and sunrise

To your days.