Nikki and I are starting Don Quijote sometime soon. I’m excited. 

The best thing about Don Quijote is that his madness is nothing more than a willful embrace of a delusion demand for adventure. This is what makes Quijote capable od changes the world. The worst thing about Don Quijote is that his disdain for ordinary life and people (which is what caused him to retreat from recognizing it in the ordinary in the first place) causes him to come incredibly close to committing murders on so many occasions. Of course, he doesn’t know that’s why, he thinks it’s because certain things are threats and must be violently engaged. This, however, is an example of uncanny in literature. Uncanny being the coined phrase of Fraud’s more interesting analysis of human fantasy. Though modified. 

It makes for good thinking about. 

The dialogue is humorous and entertaining as well.

first post in richmond.

the sky here is big. atleast as big as the ground. the word here is cut in halves. the humidity is outrageous, and the elevation is less than 300 hundred feet most everywhere my present routine requires me to travel. what do i miss?

Mountains. Quiet. The slight possibility of running into a bear on my bike. there are houses everywhere here. there’s nowhere to hike or camp around here. there are plenty of places to fish, but none of them are special or remote.

i have dreams of tazewell.

those afternoons i’d get on my bike and head for whitton valley and bike hogback. forty miles of glory. quiet. forty miles of interesting things to look at.

forty miles of green mountains. forty miles of paintless road. forty miles of the occasional muskrat, the sliding grass snake, the grazing group of deer who don’t notice you’re approaching, the rarely sighted peacock on the hill, the telling bear pile and scent. i miss the tremendous compensation the land offers me for my fatigue and effort. not compensation, encouragement.

i miss the escape, the joy, the aloneness that was never loneliness. i miss the homeness of that place. it was my home for a small portion of time. and it was the best year of my life.

Dylan Thomas wrote this:

When the wren bone writhes down and the first dawn furied by his stream swarms on the kingdom come of the dazzler of heaven and the splashed mothering maiden who bore him with a bonfire in his mouth and rocked him like a storm I shall run lost in sudden terror and shining from the once hooded room crying in vain in the cauldron of his kiss.

Could you do better?

My first Pabst was accompanied by Italian lines of misanthropy. It was memorable. I love the milder affects of it, as all things which are loved should be loved, because its warmth defies the extremity of Leopardi’s despair which is now associated with Pabst. Beer makes everything better. Even Sylvia Plath and the winter. 

DARE DENY IT.

I really do appreciate the complexity of Biblical characters. Noah was a drunk. Abram was dangerously indecisive, Ham was inconsiderate…I love the tremendous drama between Sarai and Abram in spite of the brevity in which it is dealt with. 

Here’s what’s really on my mind…

It makes me sad, that I let it happen. That couldn’t stop it from happening. That I let it happen. That it was always going to happen. That I couldn’t produce the necessary miracle. Like Lancelot, yearning for God’s permission to perform a miracle. It makes me sad. I’m sorry.

Just to clarify: Lancelot in my favorite rendition of the stories was ugly as a monkey.

“To Man”

All change begins in the soul

O man,what do the tired fractals of pine branches carry other than the screech owl you spy? Wading through the Pacific, what content is Orion’s finally? The Taoist says our bodies are for carrying us, but what comfort does that lend really? Aren’t we tired? Aren’t we bored with it? Fuck the news of the soul. Let us wield tried and true themes of excursion and progress and so gain our peace and our material heading. Let us love our beauty and worry of its outcome. Let us devour ourselves. Let us see pain and weep for its familiarity. Let us drool over the infamy of things and grow jealous of the outlaw, the bandit, the hermit. Let us commend our heinous bravery and zeal to wage war together. Let us wage war together. Let us be brothers.

“My past and my Future.”
-Day
Ghost of my father sits apologizing for going away to be a criminal and I can hear his lungs are black as coal. He weeps and his face is dark and lined like an ape and the bags under his eyes are impressive. He looks at me like his life’s design was to look at me. The ghost of my father sits apologizing for going away to be a criminal, but it’s only a VHS. 
-Night
I am given to the weight of a blanket and from the softness of your stomach I see a mosque’s domes 
painted in grays and I am the Ottoman builder of those delicious building points. There is a raw smell in the stuffiness beneath the covers, and it’s like a call and beckon. But this time it is too severely 
night for the kind of prayer I need to say, because sex is a prayer, and so I leave the goings-on of 
religion to the whim of God, for I am dreaming now, and so are you and it’s been a long day.



“Religious”
“I shall vibrate like silver; then everything beneath me will live, and whatever wanders lost in things will strive toward the light…” Rilke
This afternoon is a whirring choir of yard work that rolls through my window like the crusades, so that out of a nap and three seconds from a manta I dream of kissing, I squint at the clock and begin again like a sudden westerly and O hill to which my torpor is lost, Rich Mountain, neighboring giant, mosey on to holiness and may this range, and this air which deepens valleys, keep the Lord at bay, for the world is unready and Zacharias’s beard moves gently in the night with the week’s grime and grease lingering there and shining in the glow of what miraculous thing fucks his wife beside him because the divine has whispered John’s name to the devil in a confidence only they can know, for salvation is a resolve no trickster can hope to break and the tiny hand of the one who will eat the fruit of the locust tree and drink the liquor of the worker bee is working its way through Zacharias’s beard, still dancing in the memory of God’s presence and the child in this moment knows his father like the rest of us know our fathers and there is a Mason-Dixon of twine running flush and strong across the universe, the world we live in, the childlike, curious object of cherubim coloring books and a few people here wait for the dispute with sour intent and a quake in their boots, ready to storm the hills of judgment to judge and be judged and to take that veritable Lord Nelson if it’s the last thing they do, and so what we do saves us and smoldering bowls of tobacco set rebel faces aglow under the pitter-patter tin roofs and the scrawny Union king gets a chill up his back and well, the tired mysterious drama of an era has endured as anyone can see and perhaps that history will tumble across the back of a turtle into grass somewhere and understand in that slow way we live by, the terms of the encompassed, and then be crushed by a man walking in the time of the evening breeze smelling the laurel, the way histories are crushed every day by the foot of an oblivion always in uproar for landscape like grinning philistines who congregate around Saul’s body and the undertaker who stoops over Thomas’s defiant poem in the sun till the sun breaks down and everything touched by light touches the eye so that the distance of geography is bewitched by the perceptive animal and, why, there is no line which will not be crossed, no irony with which we are not in love and so maybe when you die you sit with God beside your body and talk like brothers in youth until the earth’s socratic knowing of your bones no longer takes priority over new grain say or forgetting you entirely, as must and should be the custom, for we are no breeze in some vacuum, we possess that inviolable sanctuary of death, we are the sort to be misremembered and tonight someone’s canoe moves the sky as crickets lull the world to bed and the noise of a flailing man I’ll never meet caught in a river is heard by bears and pines only, pines which spread spores sometimes in the wind with the perfection of randomness, or maybe just the dumbest faith observable next to the apocalypse every death must be and there must be some beast lumbering on its knuckles into camp, intent on being asleep by the coals the moment groggy poachers shoot it and please Lord, there must be some mortal beauty which will quit while it’s ahead, the way Christ did, something to conjugate the profound bullshit of our hoping into something useful like ideology or defiance or surviving, coping, or imagining, or all things good and holy, and whatever does that must seize and hold the dark figure standing just beyond the tremendous voltage of our lives, until the redemptive, gleaming, bullshit of daybreak, outrageous, comes like a slow firecracker of our guessing, and so for the notion that to pray is to care enough, in the wish-fish form of God’s glory, everything old is made new again, glory be to God.




                                   You taught me to demand better.