Inner and Outer Life in NY

I’ve starting writing again, words rising like ice in a glass, like truth in life, the way the image comes out when you rest your pupils in a magic eye picture and its suddenly all clear. I’ve started thinking how funny it is we need rest and relaxation to achieve real activity, and how strange I chose the most unrelaxing city in the vicinity to achieve this. But we all did; moved to New York to "get somewhere" only to slowly or quickly find out where we need to go is inside. Whether this dawns quickly or slowly depends on how fast things crumble. A road dissolving beneath you will surely sink you down into the present faster than a spoon into oatmeal, whether you like it or not. If your road is fortified with self-gilded lies it will take longer, and if the lies are held up by others' confusion, even longer. Your path will seem sure and steady till you’re old and realize the gild you saw was a fog that left you floating in illusion for too long.

This world to the next. Funny how we have to be here to transcend here, how we have to be so in our bodies to become more spiritual. How we have to root down to fly. Its a slippery slope, using words to get to non-words, because we come to believe in the words more than the meanings. Or maybe that’s just me, the poet who gets caught up in syllables and the hooks of js and gs on unreal white computer screens, forgetting I’m writing an idea, and that I’m writing the idea to get beyond the idea, to a feeling, a perseption.  Maybe we get caught up in bodies and forget we are spirits. How many of us get caught up in the hooks of smiles and lines of eyes we see in the mirror and written on others, forgetting they are lines writing an idea of us, an idea shielding the reality of us as experience.

When I hurt my back this year it was like my computer crashed and I lost the last few chapters of the novel I’d been working on, laboring over. It was a fast halt, a slowing down, to get beyond actions to activity, beyond words to feelings. Whenever things slip away there’s that fall before the landing into present. I tend to get quite eleveated into dreams and thoughts, and that fall into reality can be hard.

I swear I am grounded when writing this, and not high on anything, except the image of the lines of the train outside this window, running along elevated tracks like its floating. My mind has been running like that train, from one borough to another, over and over again for a year. Soon, it will stop.