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Attending

“More than intending, the poet attends!” -Dean Young

How do you bend the mind to change it? Expand it, step inside of it, push out the repetitive, the ruminative, the dead-end future-pursuing want-to-be problem solving Effort-For-Nothing?

The Effort-For-Nothing

Not a Dominatrix

But a pigeon-holing

Good-For-Nothing

Two-Timing

know-it-all

piece of No-Peace-Giving

Bullshit.

I think you have to embrace It.

“Attends to the conspiracy of words as it reveals itself as a poem, to its murmurs of radiant content that may be encouraged to shout, to its muffled musics there to be discovered and conducted” -DY

There’s something violent in me. Something that wants love and hates ignorant impotency, the cat-calling cacophony surrounding innocence, purity, relief, Genuine-Being.

The Question:

When does It Break-Free?

The Break-Free.

The Violent Innocence,

Robbed of Naivety.

I still love the smell of wetness clinging to growing leaves on sad trees, seeing us abuse and violate and obliviate ourselves as if nothing was ever real or worth anything.

Innocence can be a mean,

Thick-Skinned Giant.

Innocence is wiser than the wide mouth of a mentally ill world devouring the Real, vomiting Treachery.

Innocence is something the world and I have tried to suffocate in me but it is there

and It Is.

It Is.

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Tales of Ordinary Madness excerpt

I got through the first 30 minutes, asked for a ten minute break, got down off the stage with my bottle and sat at a table with Belford and 4 or 5 students. A young girl came up with one of my books. God o mighty, baby, I thought, I’ll autograph anything you’ve got!

“Mr. Chinasky?”

“Sure,” I said with a wave of my genius hand. I asked her name. Then wrote something. Drew a picture of a naked guy chasing a naked woman. Dated it.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Chinasky!”

So this was how it worked? Just a bunch of bullshit.

I took my bottle out of some guy’s mouth. “Look mother, that’s the 2nd hit you’ve taken. I’ve got to sweat another thirty minutes up there. Don’t touch that bottle again.”

I sat in the middle of the table. Then I took a pull, sat it back down.

“Would you suggest writing as a career?” one of the young students asked me.

“Are you trying to be funny?” I asked him.

“No, no, I’m serious. Would you advice writing as a career?”

“Writing chooses you, you don’t choose it.”

-Charles Bukowski-

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They’ll Fall Down

The irony of backing up is I don’t know what’s behind me.

The irony of backing up…

A blind backing out of safety.

These comforting cold monoliths

are limiting my vision.

”You were three hundred sixty degrees—I depended on you for a lot of things”

I can’t believe you allowed yourself to know, that you found such strength, without me, to grow,

With my back against these self made walls, I’m bottomlessly grateful.

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Dead Growth

There was a place you went with her

that I didn’t understand-

a place where the line was drawn

clearly in the sand.

 

We went from a place where I was sure you would die under my “protection”

We went from a place where I felt unseen, beaten, misplaced, taken for granted—manipulated, hated, used, just stuck

 

The

Dead Growth—

 

that feeling that someone will make it better when you’re stuck—

 

that feeling that someone New doesn’t get to give a fuck about the hours you pull, the things you see, the loneliness at night when there’s no one to be.

 

who do you become

 

Among the dead growth?

 

Who dies,

Among the Dead Growth?.

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Sense of Smell

So, your twist on reality is related to  your senses: Smell, Sound, Touch.

I know how the wood on the edges of the old bar feels at work.

I know how the upstairs smells when I’m printing new beer menus.

I know how the lighting shines in my eyes when I’m dimming the bulbs.

It’s a different thing to talk about our whole orientation to life.

I read an article today about toxoplasma gandii, which we can apparently get from cats that makes us much more aggressive and risk taking. What stuck out to me was the part about a change in the likability of certain smells–smells that one once liked, one may suddenly hate.

I am a smell person. I say this knowing that we are not all smell people: I have dated a few people who are not smell people and they are very shocking to know, once you find out who they are.

IE: The way your clothes and breath smelled did not strike them the way their clothes and breath smells struck you… Essentially you fell in love with someone on terms they never cared about. Devastating, and it happens every day.

(I have had the sad luck of falling for probably A person who was my equivalent in sensation-sensitive sensing. And I am sure it haunts you forever: Forever wondering if that person, however inept they were in every or any other way, maybe would satisfy you the most because they could get real deep into the smell of leaves rotting in the fall or the thick, musty smell of the wood of an old dresser some family member left you.)

What does it mean to be a sensation person?

I’m not sure yet, but it makes me worry that there is a lot more going on to sensation than what we accredit to it. My sense of smell orients me in endless ways that the more evolved part of my brain doesn’t have to deal with.

Being a very logical and generally, overly-level-headed person, I wonder if there isn’t some sort of fight going on between our two brains.

I also read an article today about suicide. How verbal it is: Waking up to “You should end it today”. How absent the senses are from such a perception.

Is it possible that our brains are fighting some sort of sensation versus logic war where the suicidal are always too logical but also somehow at just the same time super overly sensitive? The classic two sides to the same coin??

Is that not exactly what every drug addict, depressed, ADD, hyperactive, bipolar person is? A marrying of the sensitive with the logical, to the point of breakdown? Everything makes too much sense and so much sense on the sensation spectrum?

Where can we exist where this makes sense? Do we have to be a couple generations (or endless generations) of stuck, confused people? Or do we figure out how these types of questions and, more importantly, PERCEPTIONS, are the forefront, the center piece, to what it is to be alive?

Instead of the background of genius, pain, and self-destruction, Do we find a comfortable, comforting and accepting place?

That should be the goal, at least…

Are we maybe a battle of the logical versus sense-ical parts of ourselves?

Is the deep, dark sense of pain in me that’s been living and breathing hard since i was young not some silly thing, not some categorical “depression” or “addiction” thing, but a part of me that has been taught to me by society that I am trying to reconcile with the part of me that wants to throw this computer across the room and go lay outside on the ground with the spiders and moths

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Opaque

A feel and release,

Filling up.

In my spleen or guts or some such space in the fluid around my brain

a blockage-

a wall-

Setting apart a sweet, colorful warmth

In dreams, at home, in meditation, in flavors and smells

and this other sense-

of stress, defensiveness, loneliness, carrying-others-around.

A short focusing.

A sensation of defense against the other side-

being pushed to be, to honor something in the scaffolding of my

miscommunication with others, a step or several steps away from what is

Organically Me.

A fear of being pushed to honor something

-the layers of habit, protection of myself against recklessness

of those who say “I need you to be this please”

-as opposed so thoroughly to what is underneath, the foundation,

the “this is what I am”, this is ME.

A changing, a moving, a shifting toward More Good,

I start to see through this wall, it begins to grow opaque

as the experience of what was on the other side becomes less and less

common and frequent and thus Existent, more and more

a memory, an actual Past, but, no, not anything as incorrectly

value-strewn as a Mistake.

As I put away the weapons of battle against Feelings, I put down the battle.

I find I like them. Warm, calm, quite nice.

Then, I see how my weapon also is a part of the defensive scaffolding-

a means of helping me be, feel like I am being, what others

want, for others needs.

In putting down the weapons of battle, I put down the defense.

The need for the wall becomes less and less

as the darkness on the other side becomes

a ghostly truth of a past.

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A Movement Toward Perfection

I body scanned,

I performed

In my fingers and toes, tingles swarmed.

An electric pulse scanned my thighs,

I felt my guts gurgle, circular in pattern.

Thoughts focused in my second brain

where my ingested food, alcohol, and worry lies-

Anger in the liver, worry in the tummy-

In this focused awareness of my body on the floor,

my being in space on the mat,

its resistance, minute by rotating minute, dies.

In to the belly, out through the nose,

my eternal breath goes.

I’m struck–my thoughts are only what I decide to attend to

usually in my environment, based on habit,

out of want for safety, fulfilling a perceived need,

usually doing, calculating, the fulfilling.

But underneath all of this, these blips I

carry, grasp, fill up on, pay energy-homage to,

my guts, my muscles, fingers and toes,

the spaces in between,

the tension in my spleen,

is telling me, creating me, communicating me,

and into my consciousness, awareness they are spilling–

A message, a truth, a movement toward perfection.

You can’t, they gargle, be, see all unless you

replenish, protect me, your insides, with nutrition, pro-biotic supplementation,

use your taste buds, your eyes, your nose, your ears.

You can’t, they nauseate, detoxify

on a level necessary to fully embrace love,

that anger less state,

if you keep dumping that blurratious

waste into your liver, out of anger’s yeast, fear.

You are good on your way and the starting point is here.

Be kind to yourself, slow down–

This supernatural point in space

you occupy will only clear.

Start here, start here.

In towards my lower lungs,

out through my toes,

the rhythm in the space between,

the breath, it goes.