12 October 2022

Every Season an Apocalypse


Apocalypse, n. 
Etymology: < Latin apocalypsis, < Greek ἀποκάλυψις, noun of action < ἀποκαλύπτειν to uncover, disclose, < ἀπό off + καλύπτειν to cover.

– The Oxford English Dictionary

From now on I will make burning my aim,
From now on I will make burning my aim,
for I am like the candle: burning only makes me brighter.

– Rumi

Part of me wondered if we were playing with emotional wildfire & pretending it was candlelight. 

We wrote our own mythology, signed it with lightning and sweat and made it something new. 

I, your troubled writer. You, my dark muse, shedding old skin and trading it for new armor, always staying close enough so that we could discover each other again and again in every season, in every personal apocalypse. 

Did we meet in the fall? I don't recall what the leaves looked like on our first night together, only your scent, the sourdough taste of champagne – and later your perfumed skin – and the candlelight of our table doubling as wildfire. 

When leaves fall in autumn, they uncover the sky. 

Every kiss we share is a sweet apocalypse illuminating a singular revelation with emotional wildfire over and over again: together, we burn brighter and hotter than we could with anyone else, lighting the path to uncover other mysteries, other myths, and the strange power that comes from intermingling our dreams, sophisticated and feral, always hungry for another night.

Always and again. 



10.5.2020

11 October 2022

Hundreds of Bodies in a Vast Unmarked Grave

 There are 438 pieces of writing on this site - 439, if you count this one - and nearly all of them are saved as drafts. I am hesitant to delete them, as they represent over a decade of personal history, and like most everything else that represents the decades of my personal history, I have no desire to engage with them.

For the Chinese bots and rare readers that stumble on this site or still visit 12 years after I started it, these pieces might as well be bodies in a single unmarked grave. You're standing on them with every visit, with no idea what they look like, what their names were, or what significance they played here. It's like looking at the ocean: you might have an idea of what lies beneath its surface... but you don't really know. 

For me, it's a bit different. I see the names, the original dates of publication, the odd cover photo here and there, and, despite the time that's passed since I wrote – and later unpublished – them, I still remember the contexts, if not the content. The contexts are invariably embarrassing, but perhaps 6 - 12 years isn't enough temporal distance to blunt their sting or perhaps I should send everything to my therapist so that we can initiate the processing that it would require to decide whether to delete them all or republish them as some tiring, vulgar Unvarnished Truth About Writing that, if nothing else, might titillate voyeuristic lovers of epistolary novels and run-on sentences. 

Either decision would require digging up these graves; digging up pieces of myself that I was relieved to finally discard. Although there always exists the possibility that I might find some minor treasure – a perfect sentence, a forgotten line of poetry – I would still see it as tarnished by context; it would be unsalvageable except as a sterile relic that other people might enjoy, but that I would cringe at. There is no reason for me to grab the shovel or cast the nets. 

At least not tonight.