Doubt - It may lead you to confirm belief.
Question - It may lead you to understand.
Honor obstacles - For a set amount of time. Your strength to overcome them may gather.
Rest - So your energy may be restored.
Release control - To remember it is only an illusion.
Go under.
Shut out. Be silent. Give over. Lie in the darkness. Be weak for the moment. Incubate.
Emotion points you down to dwell where the mind and spirit can reset. Exercise your intelligence in these murky depths. Release your grasp so your muscles do not become rigid around an idea. You will be rigid when you are dead.
What comes from strength goes to strength. If you are on the right path and in fact strong in your footing, you will emerge renewed, enhanced and sure. Bank your embers to build yourself dynamic and hot, not a cold automaton enslaved to your higher ideals through rote and routine. Only then can you be free in your chosen path, and your fire will burn bright.
Going Under
I am a walking PR
I am a walking PR.
My strength is epic.
Gravity and fatigue
are brittle wood
smashed by my rising momentum.
The more weight I lift, the easier it comes.
You don’t know what I’m capable of.
I am a breakthrough.
The mountain runs through my spine.
Ocean swells in my breast.
Fire
Torrent
Boulder
My Power
Speed
Control
Stand back.
Part the seas.
The grass is on fire.
Everything has its season.
If you are only a voice now,
Stand back.
It is my time at the bar.
This is my bar.
This is my moment.
No one else has my body.
No one else has my muscles
and my strength.
These are mine alone.
These are me.
I am force.
I have arrived
and the strength of ages
thrums in my veins.
Bam!
Sleepless
because triumph
spurs the tiger in my soul
and its promise
drives me deeper
through this jungle
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy
Until one is committed
There is hesitancy, the chance to draw back
Always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and Creation)
There is one elementary truth
The ignorance which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
That the moment that one definitely commits oneself
Then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one
That would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision
Raising in one’s favor all manner
Of unforeseen incidents and meetings
And material substance
Which no one could have dreamt
Would have come your way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
GOETHE
bad night at the gym
Cold Marriage
On these platforms,
we come together
to battle ourselves,
united in solitary pursuit of a common vision.
A nod, a look, a short word
is all it takes
to gauge just where the man beside you is on the battlefield.
We can understand each other,
We can see what it is,
but no one can lift the bar for another.
Each man must fight alone.
Today I lost the battle.
Alone at night I brew tea
and stew in the depths of doubt
and frustration.
My legs
move stiffly,
knees seizing with each step.
Blood red pool aches across my thigh.
Casualties, not honor.
The marks of the body
testifying to me that
I am not fighting well.
Today I lost ground.
And I harbor blame
on this body
which did not obey
which did not listen
which failed me today.
Tomorrow we will work
on finding each other again,
my body and mind.
But tonight we are sullen
in a cold marriage,
trapped together another night
in a bed that’s too small.
my statement
If I get hit by a truck tomorrow and die, this is who I am... I am The Mighty Kat. I choose the weightroom for my fight. I pursue the personal glory of strength, and steel my spirit out of the intensity I can only reach by defying gravity with weight. And if I am not the best, I am legitimate, and I cannot stop pushing hard for more.
I do not do this because I am paid to do it.
I work in order to support it.
I do not do this because others before me in my family have done it.
I am the first.
I do not do this because someone said I should try it.
I sought it out.
I do not do this because I happened onto the resources.
I built my gym from nothing.
I do not do this because it is my natural talent.
I possess many different talents.
I do not do this because it is popular.
Most people are not aware of it.
I do not do this because I think I will turn pro.
That would never have been an option for me.
I do not do this because I am told to do it.
I direct myself.
I do not do this to impress others.
This is my private life.
So why then? The truth is, I do not know exactly why I do it, but I do know it is who I am. This is what I do. This is me in my most natural state.
And the world is a better place because of it.
How Ghost School prepared me for weightlifting
Do you have a white sheet?
Yes.
Can you emit mysterious, spooky sounds?
Yes.
Can you fly?
Yes.
Mrs. Smith looked up from the
Ghost School applications.
“So, Miss Kathrin, you can fly?”
Heads went up.
“Yes. A little bit.”
“Let’s see you fly right now, then.”
They started to sense the joke.
“Well, I need like a running start,
and something to jump off of, like a chair.”
“I want to see you fly. Come on, fly around the room, right now.”
Everybody laughed.
…
When I got home, I asked Ma what “gullible” meant.
It meant no Ghost School.
. . .
But I knew the grip of space
in the instant I tipped off a chair,
or charged off a hill
and leapt –
into air –
touching nothing at all.
For that instant
before gravity called me down
I flew,
and I knew that with the right training,
like a Ghost School could give me,
I could hone this moment,
learn how to catch that pause,
turn up from that dip toward the ground
and keep flying –
a little farther,
a little farther,
until I could lift off the ground from nothing,
veer up and hover
at the ceiling
like I did in dreams.
That was worth sleeping for.
. . .
I hoped Mrs. Smith was wrong,
that somehow the Ghost School people
would pick up those forms from school
and call my parents,
and send for me,
and we could get the training going.
But Halloween passed, and I never
heard anything else about it.
. . .
For a while I walked
underwater in my dreams,
breathing just like on land.
That was worth sleeping, too,
but no match for flying.
The best were the rare times
when I knew I was dreaming, but I could still
do it,
and soared to the top of the room,
over unsuspecting heads
and out into the sky.
. . .
I found that moment
again
30 years later
in my living room
when I stood on the hardwood floor
before the computer screen
and clean and jerked
my preacher bar with its small metal plates,
like the tiny, animated weightlifter avatar.
This was worth waking for.
Now I chase it
on the platform.
Pull,
Shrug,
Clean,
Dip,
Drive –
I throw my feet apart,
and for an instant,
touching nothing at all,
I fly.
Bill's glory days
We were a bunch of competitive farm kids. We did combat with ornery cattle, heavy machinery, feed bags, hay bales.
One of our contests was climbing the silo ladder hand over hand - one-arm pull-ups. My friend could go the whole 60-foot silo, but I could only make it about 40. I was a wuss.
In the feedmill, we handled a steel-wheeled handtruck with twelve 100-pound bags of feed at a time.
In my 30's, I was lifting and running. At one point, I could bench more than 300 pounds and run for distance.
My partner was a marine. We would hit hill country around
A deadlift was always good for me. I was used to picking up stuff. The varsity basketball players were stunned—they struggled with the machine stack for deadlift and I did the stack, with about 450 pounds of them standing on it, for a set of 10 reps.
I did Roman chair sit-ups with 200 pounds of plates on my chest, too.
Any wonder why I have a sorry-ass back now?
It felt GOOD. I'll never have those rushes again, but it has been a good life.
(real life poetry)
random poem
in the orange surf of fever
tangled in sweaty sheets
visions broke through
computer screens
from work
and i thrashed to be free
i called up the dappled light
of ohio fall
the scratch of leaves against
the wind
and sidewalk
on the way home from school,
blue sky,
the indian mounds
in the woods where
warriors had crawled
belly against dirt,
sun against skin,
the smells of october
lifting me up
into those golden red trees
before i tumbled
back into my desk,
words on the screen beating
my eyes for attention.
today,
in front of that screen,
i call up that fall day
and smile.
poem on poetry writing, by William Boggs
One of my favorite poets quickly raveled this bit for me during an email conversation. Any thoughts for a title? (Thanks for letting me post this, Bill)
Poems float to surface,
bubbles deep from a dark watered pond;
they cannot stop until they surface
and rejoin words' blue air.
Some are deep memories of past lives,
for as surely our lives are renewed
from time
to time,
person to person,
lovers gone or renewed,
and all is forgotten except air trapped
rising to surface in the thin skin
of a bubble
bursting,
poems, songs within the heart
of us
that does not change.
treading lightly
When there's sun, light falling on things must catch me up a hundred times a day. One can see masterpiece compositions with just a gaze round the yard, or a simple walk around the neighborhood. When morning sun is falling across branches of a tree, or early twilight light falls across the corner of the stove, harsh and gentle at the same time across my grandfather's teapot, I often wonder how other people don't get caught up, too. But I don't hold any weird pride in my perceptions, as some do on such matters... Because these breathtaking displays, these unsurpassingly gorgeous sights go with the territory of earth and sun. Just as we are all fortunate for carbon-based life, and all the riches of vegetation, and water and air, etc.-- just as equally, we are fortunate for the jarring beauty of lightplay as we walk the earth.
So often, I try to photograph such images just as they are, and it just doesn't work. Like these railroad track scenes. Today is an exhilarating day - altho it's January, the sky is blue and the sun on your skin warms you so it feels like spring. It's the kind of day when you walk around without your shades on because it feels so good to have sun on your face. You can't breathe enough of this wonderful air. And these tracks caught it all - spring in the midst of winter, traveling when the rest of the world is immobilized, walking on the edge of dreamtime, the magic of tracks that will lead you into another reality. Something tugging on you, opening the doorway to ... But the photos came out a little colder, a little starker... as usual, a nice image but a creation unto itself and not the one I was trying to get. So some I stylized, casting them moody to the extreme of fantasy or impressionist. Light was hitting the lens; I just let it to see what it would do. I can't decide which I like best, or whether I should give it another try.
(When I was a young teen, there was this drawing of a fence on the beach, casting a shadow, the lines bobbing over the sand. I thought that was the most aesthetically profound thing. I really wanted it, could have and should have stolen it. I did find a similar scene in a magazine and framed that for my wall. These days, my favorite photographer is Deborah DeWit Marchant. Our eyes must be the same make.)
I've always been drawn to the aesthetics of certain structures. There must be a name for it. I like natural scenes with splintery and weathered objects, lightplay of course, geometry of lines, and objects such as
fences
rails
doorways
windows
floorboards
holes in trees
cave openings
horizons
...these tracks, for instance. I wonder what that is. I think there's a word for it in earthy mythologies/religions... I seem to remember some term in magic (magick?) for doorways as places where the worlds meet. Perhaps the theme here is miniscus?
Maybe the brain is wired for this concept not only through infastructure, but through ages of collective consciousness on the end-of-life 'light at the end of the tunnel.' Come to think of it, I guess life starts alongs those lines, too...
in the zone
there are days when i cannot drag myself through a work out
when it feels like my lifting days are over
so there, that must've been the last of my youth
but
some days, it all comes together
out of the blue
of the ashes
of the smooth, earthy geode holding clear, crystal points
then i know this is part of me
not to cease until i do.
what greater satisfaction
to know oneself
and know this is mine
when my body's gone
i'll miss it
Zen of Lifting II
When I think
or let go of thinking
in those quiet moments
when the world is in synch
I know
that death
is the re-assimilation
of my electrons and energies
into the life around me,
the meaning of
going in one’s sleep.
I can feel
the peace of expanding
into eternity.
When I lift
and box,
my body contracts
from within and without,
hardened and hot
in the focus of work.
I can feel
I am a whole individual
forcing against space around me.
I can feel I am alive.
And afterward,
with more music than words
in my head,
and body rising and falling
with the swell of my lungs
and thrum of my heart,
there is a sweet twilight
where I can touch
everyone
and be everywhere
and close my eyes
and fly
Empty inkwell
Writers fear the blank page. But what happens when the ink runs dry?
The letters on my first keyboard rubbed off under my fingers.
Now the computers provide endless "ink"
and writers are John Henrying into carpal tunnel.
If only my voice didn't interfere with my muse's,
I could try an audio recorder.
--Raw photo by me, of an empty inkwell, in end-of-September twilight
zen of lifting
I do not understand anger in lifting.
There is no room for emotion in my work.
There is form, fiber direction, aligning the angle of resistance to the fibers. There is blood and oxygen filling the muscle. Core. Nerve activation, full muscular contraction...
Full range of motion, partial range, full contraction. Core. Eccentric work, the weight of the load as the muscle belly stretches out. Core. Soft knees, core stability, neutral spine, spinal stability - head, chest up, spinal alignment. Breathing. More air.
My awareness is inside, coursing through my blood like nutrients. If there is someone beside me, I do not know it. No other thoughts can survive. Emotion is out of the equation.
I release. Blood and lactic acid swell my limbs. My muscles thrum electric. Rush of elation, taste of bliss, sure fire of victory. Over and over.
As I leave the floor, the warm flood of victory envelopes me, peaked with the pump of my muscles. I am who I want to be. I am my best. My muscles reflect my hard-earned pride. I am not concerned whether anyone else sees my body, engorged and glowing. I am whole again.
anniversary of the Gulf Coast hurricanes
We're listening to voices on the radio talk about class warfare erasing the working poor from New Orleans today, bleaching Bourbon Street into a souless tourist trap with new knick-knacks ready to be swept away in the next storms...
One year ago, I sat at this computer and transcribed the following passage from This American Life. This is the kind of poetic moment that makes me freeze and focus on absorbing it completely.
New Orleans Convention Center, Row H
In the aftermath of Katrina
Then the story became, “They left us here to die. The National Guard is here to kill us.”
Talk about - there were men, just kind of like, roaming with guns, packs of men …
They were securing the area. Criminals, these guys were criminals, they were.
But somehow they got together, figured out who had guns, and decided they were going to make sure that no women were getting raped,
because we did hear about the women getting raped in the Superdome, that no one was hurting babies, and nobody was hurting these old people.
They were the ones getting juice for the babies.
They were the ones getting clothes for people who had walked through that water.
They were the ones fanning the old people.
Because that’s what moved the gangster guys the most, the plight of the old people. That’s what haunted me the most, seeing those old people sitting in them chairs and not being able to get up and walk around or nothing.
They started looting on St. Charles and there was a Rite Aid there,
and you know, you would think that they’d be stealing fun stuff or whatever because it’s a free city or whatever according to them, right?
But they were taking Juice for the babies,
Water,
Beer for the older people,
Food,
Raincoats, so that so they could all be seen, you know, by each other and stuff.
I thought it was very cool and very well organized.
… exactly like Robin Hood. And that’s why I got so mad, because they’re calling these guys animals. These guys. That’s what got to me. Because I know what they did.
I saw what they did.
You know, I never had a real high opinion of thugs myself, but I tell you one thing: I’ll never look at them the same way again.
* *
Denise Moore being interviewed by Ira Glass for This American Life, WBEZ Chicago, distributed by PRI Public Radio International. Aired 9-11-05
image from gov site
What makes a "real" poet
This postcard was on post secret this week.
I have a friend, for lack of a stronger and more accurate term, who started writing poetry while we were a couple (13 years ago, for about three years). He wrote on a regimen, every single morning for a few hours, before he went to teach classes at the local smalltown university. He never showed me his poems. He told me often that when he published a book of his poetry, he would dedicate it to me.
When we met, I was entering the most prolific writing period of my life. I hadn't written poetry for a few years, but I resumed at the beginning of our relationship, and the very first poem I wrote was accepted for an anthology. This was my first poem ever published, and it was my first poetry reading. He went with me and cozied up to the editors. Years later, he published his first chapbook through a vanity press variation. In great excitement, he sent me the book. I was actually one of several names in the dedications. Inside, a poem sneaked up on me - it was all about that poetry reading, and how horrible he thought my poem was, how he couldn't stand to hear it, how he'd dreaded this all week, and how he knew we wouldn't be together long.
Now he still writes on a regimen, carefully following established literary conventions. His poems are almost always about what's going on in his head while he's pretending something else socially. He believes he'll be the American laureate one day.
These days, I write poetry only when I am inspired. This gives me half a dozen poems or so a year, but they're all good. Some are great.
I used to consider myself to be the true poet, but I've grown to respect him as a poet as well. And his stuff's gotten better.
He recently gave me his newest book, a story through poems about "a failed love affair." I infer it's about his truest love, a woman he was involved with after me. I can't bring myself to read it. I'd rather read a book of his poetry about how horrible he thinks my poetry is.
Yellow flowers & Osho
Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. ~Osho
poem by Bobby at Skullbolt
Skullbolt: screams from a mutilated voicebox is a remarkable blog I just discovered. Bobby, the blogger, has a distinct character that resonates through his tight, evocative poetry as well as his prose and photography. Another sensitive, cynical artistic type trying to stay afloat in a society not set up to embrace such gems...What's not to like?
I am proud to post a poem and a photo by Bobby at Mighty Mix. 
The cat is not giving me CPR
when I realize what
shot out of the howling lawnmower
I wake up on a hammock
the cat is softening up a comfort spot in
the sad hole in my chest
lonely Saturdays I do nothing with
I could have remained at my desk
Friday evening and closed my
eyes until Monday morning
Smiling, I order from a catalogue
warming up the copier
the coffee machine accumulated
one drop all weekend
hanging there, finally falling
I miss lemonade
too late to get my head straight
I didn’t care about payday
I haven’t flipped pages on my calendar
Easter poem by Cupcake Man
Freedom is a Cupcake is one of my favorite blogs. Cupcake Man is a compulsive creative writer who truly revels in words, inspiration and the flow of creativity. This is a poem he posted recently, and it is with pride that I present here, by his permission, for Easter. I think it is beautiful.
1914-2006
In that field
where your body will mix with dirt
and women in black
wipe mud off their skirts
you will lie, after seven years without
your man because
he died
but now the sweet divide
erases the dying and
moments when you cried
I saw blue skies above your tomb
cruelest month? No.
this mystery of Easter
in springtime I
envy the dead
And I’ve been dead too
but I saw blue skies and tulips
today at your funeral
cherry blossoms, by me
