JesseAbbot.com

A little wind urged me to surrender - resulting in broken me. A bigger air told me to revolt: to usurp smirking Deity.

Now my old and still brokenness insists on the elements’ diplomacy. The jet stream that I had become declared itself a country.

I can ignore neither ordinary weather nor the storms’ claims to sovereignty. I seek in these changes a bridge in the song, but also fresh Histories.

Work from play for several rounds. Those who do dig deeper souls. Play from labor also nears to what provides us crop, moon, year.

I’m scooping up unwanted thoughts in an effort not to waste waste. I’m turning back to the moment’s task with the resolve to recognize tedium (and the dread of tedium) as a blessing that benefits from being given blessings in return. I’m not being in the slightest sense sarcastic. But I am praying—poorly—that I may recognize sarcasm as as an iconoclastic angel loose in a greater pocket.

Who should keep the change?

Has anyone here ever stepped into some room and noticed a quiet wind assembling the people and items there? No one will betray or otherwise tell if this force issues from one person among that number. Yes, perhaps a simpler source is behind it all. Nonetheless, events here are swirls of easy, precise air. Negative ions untell what time’s limits might or might not be.

A blessing offered in loyalty to the value of spontaneous traffic does not get caught in the traffic’s wrath. A detour or variation on the streets of innate wisdom can accommodate souls who seek no fake release. Real relief is the sexiness of all our leaves and branches sharing dignity and unschooled grace.

The mind that can be at rest and active; carelessly attentive; in a body among cosmic bodies; by turns driven by and driving feelings not distinct from theory and query; uncommitted to fixed hierarchies of brain and instinct; in love with human circles of passion and disinterest: this mind can heal here.

I never understood this until recently: how people can be jealous of our problems. Desirous of burdens and risks when they are dressed as us: the ones who appear able to handle these. It’s possible that they just like the high wire act—and can’t separate the wire from the person on it.  .  .from the height, the stakes.

It may be that being in denial of this cracked acquisitiveness or vicarious death wish was what allowed the feet to stay on the wire, on the line, up high. I shudder to consider this, but there must be an economics to this exchange of bright, bold achings. Not misery so much as missing something that can’t be admitted. Can’t be gripped or inventoried because it’s in almost everything. .  .

This .  .  .everywhere.  .  .hymn of clinging.

All of these works and wills out there insisting on one course of action or another can’t look into the immediacy of our days and hearts. Sometimes the meandering ribbons and wrappings of the instant demand a straightforward opening of the moment. Other times we need to meander ourselves.  .  .to dodge the missile (or even champagne cork) that heads to our perceived path. Don’t let the holy formulas dupe you.

The particulars—too fast car, falling branch, misplaced kiss, beautiful and awful ongoing eddies of love and mourning over the years (never quite past, but surprising us in a flash with their tenacity)—do not compute. The program will not accommodate your stammer or your limp, your non-bevelled edge. It will fool you with its simulation into thinking it can buoy up any weight.

Look to the whims of nature—and obey their flow without surrendering to their will. Nature is the counterpoint and natural foe of all of the GoodBooks. There is a third way that does not reject the genes of transcendence or presence.  .  .but has the humor somehow to know better. Don’t take my word for this—discover it for yourself in the folds of your best and worst moods and days.

Morning is an opportunity and a hunt. We decide to seek out what our day is. Sometimes we succeed at that reasonably well, and sometimes our quarry seeks us out before we have a chance. It is useful to know what we are getting ourselves into. But sometimes we don’t, and then the game’s afoot.

It can be more enlivening if we apprentice ourselves to the venom of irony and let it teach us to make medicine from it. Without this terrible yet potentially engaging poison, every person and cause and rock or thing in our way appears as an assault rather than part of the play.

There are entire populations of the world that have been deprived of the wisdom of the snake. They call it Satan, or correctly identify the vexation but not the cure. The cure is in the vexation, and it is not necessarily safe. I cry for people, millions of them, who have not found the freedom to see their own sadness.

If this dawn’s haunt of mist and chill

can rouse my spring to steeper dreams,

.

and still my preterm halcyon cheer—

the inverse of the wintry Halcyon bird

.

whose sex life turned iced sea and gales

placid—if breath suspended in vernal air

.

may lure my inner winds to winter grim

instrumentally, to make a fleeting point

.

in my skull, memento mori, I’ll be pleased.

Call on weather for intercessory sway of my nature.

The highest of all castes is the merchant

when the hurricane of market sleeps with open eye

and there is a lull in the day to sweep the floor

and breathe, from sale to meal. Deal me in,

.

says the convicted gambler, but the decent

dealer, too, wants a drag on the oxygen-rich

breeze of honest chance. I want a store,

but I keep taking in all of these stray poems,

.

and a shop mandates a different sort of hand

than this holder of pen or now of “send”

key. And the Keeper of my Ledger, whoever

that may be, won’t grant vendor’s stamp

.

and seal to me, me of low bracket

and high demands, untouchable soldier-

priest of the Unreal that I am, and am

again. Accept my plea to peddle ego’s pedigree.

Sometimes surrendering beyond whatever weather feeds us

means urging ourselves to look before the weather strikes—

and at both sites, elements and exertion

a world only falls into place through something quieter

than time, livelier than sex. Far from here, rare clerics

scare up the name brand poems for the fame of silence,

where we’re told to give without regret, deliver

without holding. All of which may be fair, but the loveliest

laughter is offstage—or within the bosom of our forgetting,

where all of this activity is bundled, blessed, rolled out like the tide.

Sometimes balance seeks abruptness

to come to our attention. Those who doubt

my authority may have trouble clotting their own.

The spontaneity you hate is your own lost heart.

Poetry is much more of an exact science

than anthropology, but there are many inexact poets.

My training is in opening up your lips to whistle.

The root of the word “ode” is nightingale.