12/26/13

Midnight Hours

It's an artic night in Baltimore - & all my friends have come & gone again. Flying through the starry skies with heavy navy clouds. Wish I could reach up & part them like waves. Wish it was next time already - March with all its plans.

My how great it is - was - a moment ago just then. So close to grasping onto the idea itself. Everyone's trains & planes & dreams away -- everything in planning & earnest fruition too. The joining together of NEW plans & stories. (What blessings!) And the pulling apart too...

Turn & meet - the New Year. It looms next, like tonight's solstice, and everything feels delirious. Tooth aching. Something aching, remembering the promises unkept of last year. The shimmering potentiation that seemed to sparkle above it all. Determinations all answers lay just a year, or sooner, away. What collisions!

And so we make up whatever answers come to mind in strange wake-ups before dawn.

----

You can dream more safely than moving - of the one really wanted. Douse every sweet inch of imagined skin & night with fullest romance. If you took her, blushing, and committed to passion for eternity of nights never lived yet.

Because the thing - it lives. Survives something of you & her - that neither will ever, really reach. Throw a match to the gasoline all the same - in tumultuous raucous sleep. Hating your instincts & loving her; get the rest really needed. Wake & repeat.

We deal our souls into a secrecy - making a quake of desires. Sacred as the eyes leading two to there... The majestic, beautiful, fucked, triumphant failure of wanting & pushing away all at once. Think yourself so proud & grown and feel so...disoriented in every leap that isn't her. So why don't you just steal? Just another sin added to the list, but what of it? -- if she's lying there when you wake, and wake again -- in stead of disappearing like cobwebs back in another nightmare. Trace her body like you would the lines of words & parables & pieces of dust on that lonely bed of yours. Make the phantom so carefully imagined real and so terrifiying..ingly into you. Because maybe this time love won't be the failure. Maybe you'll save yourself in the pools of her eyes, or the ointment of condensation dripping down her chest...

----

Got 'till the clock strikes midnight, of ANY nights this dear year. And that's what it's like.
It can be that close -- or that far into seas or stars.

12/15/13

Lost at sea


Think my Soul went off somewhere else a few months back. Back to a hiding place created in childhood. Finally realized how it had been missing --- been so eerie quiet in my heart beats. 
Laid on the cold tiles last night trying to breathe slowly. Exhale… and inhale…. 
Feeling the panic rise again at the waves of….I don't know, life. 
Body learned after so many times an instinct; a dread of early tremors. Taught the connection of love to loss. 
Ain't that an awful thing. Been trying to teach it otherwise for all the years since that earthquake. 

So give me Time after all. Cause I've been begging for everything else. // Pour me the deepest tablespoon of thick ameythst-colored liquid and let it drain into my bloodstream. Let it fix the cracked throat and cracked mind altogether. 

I don't know if I had the answers all along, or never ever once. Because everything of memories of a past life --- the sensations ---- seems as if they never were. A forgetfulness has settled quietly, without even realizing, above the raptured break. Above the end. It's the time of year when ice does that too; above broken holly branches and everything ---  gets stuck. 

---- 

So if you find yourself out at sea on a cold snowy night where the waves have so much extra force --- and there's a magic you suddenly feel....Try to catch it in a big fishing net -- my soul --- and come on home. 
Open the door to find me waiting in a room so blue-dark, -- where corners & drapes & sheets that once filled with reflections by candles and burning sage --- ….and fill it with light again. Bring her back to me wherever she's gone because I'd forgotten the way so long ago… 





12/4/13

New Air


There's something about the December air -- The very breathe of it makes wide room for pulling near. For drawing close and opening, like the splintering of early ice, conversations of the past. Healing and shivering all at once. 

/ / / All Autumn you've repeated the same words over again, until they match the rhythm of crunching leaves while walking --- and you've forgotten all original meaning has faded. / / /
Now, exposed there's the reminder of the New Year, of the holidays, and all regained hope for new passions. 

The fire crackles there under the mantle, and we envy it instantly. Yearn for the passion and the warmth, beneath layers of blankets and hidden wounds of a past year. Dive into the depths of tea cups in hopes that all will feel as calm --- and yet in brilliant, falling, opposition as well. 

This time of year, I wish the month in its entirety could be spent freely --- I'd wander the now-barren woods, watch the waters on the Bay rolling over cold, and embrace all the loved ones near. The finality of it all --- wastes no time in finding jolly times. Waste no time, while the snow holds off a bit longer, and there's places to be...


10/4/13

Hurricane on the Bayou


You know there's a hurricane coming up the Bayou. It's pushing north all of those waves again, and I can feel the rupture of the seas inside. Breaking, to know it's suffocating the air from the pocket between dazzling waters & the sky heavens-upward.

Wonder if it'll reach my doorstep just aside, in a giant puddle --- and we'll all have to paddle away in wooden canoes..... and breathe slowly looking at the sight around.
Beautiful destruction, like snow covering everything white and pure.


/ / /
As a kid one evening, the tide went very, very far out in the Bay, a rare event in nature --- so that the new lapping edges almost started at the opposite shore a mile off ---- and you could walk & frolic in quarter-inch mushy sand all the way past where a day ago was drowning height. 
I remember how tall my father seemed with his dark hair and thick coat, how beautiful the stormy sky looked, and how strange it was that something I loved could just recede….. 

How it was truly magic.


In such a child's way -- I wondered if the water would ever return, and if I'd ever remember that moment & sight -- so I squeezed my eyes real tight and froze it. Re-opened them, and Dad hollered over the wind; "Let's head home sweetheart, Mom will be worried" 

What I'd give to go back there, how it seemed (for the first of many times), like nature itself --- felt like me. Like my insides mimicked entirely. So many years before the first heartbreak, but I felt it coming just then --- without the words to define the thought. Or even the idea of love. 

/ / /


Now, oh…. think I need a couple months just of thought. + A thousand years of nights just lovin'. + Candlelit baths, lounge chairs outside in the woods, all the pages and canvases to cover. All to re-start my body again. 
Feel only -- and all of --- the moments that chase the nightmares away.

All of the passion I no longer understand so fully. Less than that child on the shore. She knew everything, and then forgot it all. 


Guess that's how it goes, waiting for the next storm. Readying ourselves for winter coming shortly. Readying our minds for new moons and new….decisions. 

In the morning I'll drive down to shore just to see an old friend for a little while. Just to know from where I come. 





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9/4/13

The Papers


/ / / / a little short story, a little tale about innocence... / / / / 


That girl you knew is dead. Read it in the papers the other day. Someone wrote her into a movie in the hills of California. And she's gone. 

She was sweet and delicate, and playing with the strings of new ideas & youth. Eagerness in her eyes so trusting, laid everything of herself against me while we laid. But I just made the warm honey summer cold. Wanted to strangle something of the naiveté out, like the juice that ran down the counter edge. 

Now I'm playing with piano keys in an empty hotel room lobby, and she's gone. Funny I'd see you here because I've been wanting to talk of someone near. Someone of 'the times my man, when we were the crowd being talked about. A time when I lied and said it meant everything. 
It meant so much more. It truly was the world she always talked about living in. It existed as she had built it in the air with fingertips and stories. 

Wonder where the soul is now, if I could get it back. Force it back to Earth for a jubilee. Wonder if it's new creation is something even greater. 
All the years are growing so very fast. All the mem-or-iesss...so wondrous.





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8/27/13

Chi Hotel


I laid in bed all evening, because it was the kind to do so. ----- One where tired, hot feet rest in cool, white sheets-- hair still smells of sand -- and your body, feels good. A lovers kind of night, when joy fills long silences…and both get so happily lost in the playing field of a bed. Lost, what a wide word. Lost, like I've been a time again. ------ Knowing the sun is setting from the reflections between heavy hotel curtains. Not daring to move and brake the trance of lonely trails of mild revelations and word-spells.

What is it about this city that feels this way? Something about the way nothing comes to mind for a response to all the great mess quietly forming around my head like a grimy, binding, fog. Something about the wide streets and wonderful sites, and grey - grey - shiny grey- all around. And the people -- so many of them. All the hours that I walked today. 

Want to fly home tomorrow just to move, want to fly back just to feel. Want everything all at once --- liked I used to say. But it's so much farther away than a townhouse down the road bursting broken with passion and cut ecstasy. 








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8/14/13

Force.


What's that about the midnight oil? Cause I've been burning it. Turning it. Destroying the remnants of a thing constructed once, in the raspy finish of talking -- between laughter hurls -- late into the night, over the distance of us. Forgot to stop, and disappeared into…what? Letters of words - of air - they're just nothing, but everything, of what distant lovers say to feel. To give all the pieces away in a release of finding someone so alike -- all so wonderful -- the making plans, sharing pasts, the whispering yourself away. 

And then in the air tonight -- strolling out of work last, -- like it came from my own self, summoned, there was that tiny breathe of autumn chill. How I loved it dearly already. And how far away the love so different -- of an idea --- was. Felt strong, felt lonely, felt so entirely like it was never there, and never was. Just as I've heard it was. 

Have I been hiding it well? Like the dark circles under the eyes, like the daily tolls -- like everything else, I've fermented into something entirely else. Something to be drunk down on so-humid weekend nights, on the porch with the bugs --- my new drink of choice, instead of any liquor at all. 


Travel the seas why don't you -- as far as they lead, and get lost. Lose everything of me in a great wide night on the ocean when everything swells with each swell -- into a great mass of storm and force. That's all the poetry I've 'have left for now. 

Can't wait for everything on the other side of all of this great pause, this+that great deadlines and swelter of heat, and plummet of.... Want to feel the rapture of a true force taking hold within again. Want to feel beyond the whispers. Want to ignite the fires, and dance within that pocket of air between --- like once, as a rumbling child, did. But so much greater, in such a captivating calm anew.




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6/16/13

Summers Gone by


Let me tell you a little story….


You know I've been thinking lately of past summers sensations --- telling the stories of all the meet-cutes and danger we put ourselves in, that Time has made into just charming stories --- I'm telling them over the sounds of the night bugs in the humid low-lying hideaway by the Bay, sipping down a cold one, and leaning into a creaky wooden chair with one arm still on the cold metal table, leading my audience in. 
We're all laughing and wanting more.
All this caused -- 'cause it's flooding back in a typhoon talking of "first-times", -- and seeing him again in the dim, smoky light of a bar, as the smell of the first skin I knew so well comes closer -- sending such shivers of nervousness that no stiff drink will ever calm, still. (What was I saying??)

All these years gone by, and we look at each other with the most thunderous silence. Can't remember what a single word has ever meant, --- what's the point talking of sounds? None would have the same abstract longings conveyed as one look -- knowing everything in it was of each other's force & taste -- knowing me deeper than makes logical sense. Take me however you like (I'm thinking). 

Was it doom we felt back then? The timing so wrong -- but the pull ever harder to fight. So many nights in the past, that I'm strangely breathing up --- like the heat rises from the grass each morning ---
….every one started with his smirk, and my loosing it in laughter --- pointing across the dance floor to pull me onto it…locking the kitchen door to start a water fight and tugging off the soaking-wet clothes and lifting me up by the waist…running down the stairs to get away from the party…skinny-dipping with a bottle of whiskey…the pictures he was always taking with my camera as I hid....whispering nonsense & hints in the darkness of a movie theatre…finding ourselves to be the last ones left awake on a couch with cards and beer…and him taking my old ring and proposing. Always pretending there was more time. Everything he ever whispered into my ear forgotten now but how I believed it so.

We were kids then, but we felt so old & wise.  



So now it is --- when I watch some smoky dance floor by the water's edge -- where there's a live band blasting "Georgia" (or something like it) into the summer night, while the partners dance in an intoxicating back&forth so slowww-oh, so wet with lover's sweat and anticipation --- I remember us. Dancing the same way. I remember following wherever you led -- and the night you told me to leave you behind and never look back. 




.

5/6/13

Untitled


Wish it would rain, so I could say everything. Wish it would be that urgent. 
The tree outside shakes in a mad frenzy, and then slows -- and I'm begging it to go on. Spelling' from the very chest of veins, to make those tiresome clouds finally burst, ...to make the rushing sound as it all descends. Silent parables being said -- and then the tree begins again -- and then stops just as night comes. 
Damn. 
Now even if the storm comes -- the evening will swallow it, and I'll only hear the sounds it makes. What of the sounds? What of all this beautiful murmur, the talk forming in the tiny pauses between each potential droplet? - is it lost in the greater orchestra of a story? Vanishing in the mist that's rising from the grass --- against cold air & heated soil --- and with every change, the result is different of which temperature wins out. 
Guess I'm battling the same. Rising with it, and falling in such a pollen-haze--- and finding the yearning for summer grow. 


Wish it would rain, 'cause I wanna tell you everything there is. So sorry that the words, they're barely crawling -- like moss --- to my lips for speaking. I need to wear so many more explanations, before the simplest thing ever said can exist...need these things I make to wait awhile sometimes. 

Meet me in the thick of it all --- the Southern summer --- and by then I'll know just what to say. By then, we'll be old in our thoughts -- and new in our thick company. You'll tell me all the stories a second time, and I'll feel the sound of the low waves, and the pier we're sitting on.


.

4/7/13

Shaughnessy




This time of year - it burns in me again and again. Must be the approaching day of birth that makes a fever, a catastrophic courage, not felt elsewhere. In all the valleys of the mind and seasons. All the ties I've bound myself to and can't entirely escape. --- They feel breakable in spring. I play all my characters at once, and the stars keep rising, the blooms keep breaking, bursting, open.

The parables of time that form in tangible clouds of smoke - the last real dive bar in existence - climbing questions into the force pulling me within breathing paces away of a magic man. Chaperone me a little longer because I might, I might -- take him with the night -- if either were to break the trance; on instant impulse. Blinking awake and gasping all at once.
Would take him in the street -- with it's draped any-holiday lights -- with all it's risk of being run over, by either soul, of course. More than bodies.

But I only had till dawn -- and it was rising. My friend yawning, and the long highways home rumbling just outside ever louder.
Another man livin' far away from my little cobble town of ghosts, and fractured streets. The rarity of words -- so intoxicating and gentle, and tightening -- and oh, how it shivers from the smell so wonderful -- better than anything available to consume.


---

Waking late the next afternoon, shaking off the entrapments of some labyrinth, and laughing. With the sun piercing the curtains -- decadently pushing myself back into the night before.
Feeling - in a rare moment - that all my friends all over were in arm's reach just then. ---And just because it's spring, and I'm getting older, and the road had brought another beautiful mind to imagine. And just because - you can seem to love someone for the span of stars and a day, in this life of strange encounters. It all makes some profoundly distant sense of make-believe. All disappears softly, and it's ok.


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3/24/13

The Motel - Intro

The early spring snow is starting to fall on the roof of the little Motel. Inside each of the green doors are 13 unlucky lives. I can see it across the way through a bare winter tree. It's on one of my dark days.
The cars coming and going, the trash piling up.
And a single red neon "OPEN" light never seems to flicker.



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3/15/13

Thinking of the coming weekend, of waking up with him on Sunday morning.


It's only on the sunny days that I think of us talkin' on the porch that summer. So it must be one, on the other side of that factory wall, that I can't see. Some sunlight would be nice.

Spring is - better than we've ever been.






3/1/13

Aren't we one for tellin' stories these days. Aren't I one for the books - pullin' on another window that won't open. Wishin' that spring air could just fall down over the mountains so this place could fill with a little light. Takin' a silent exhale on a smell of cologne.
Looking away into the corner of any room where imagination makes a moment for divination.
Might as well have been daylight -- cause nothing of the shimmer of the night could 'ya let wash over. Just gulping down that whiskey of restraint. Nothin' but space apart should we keep makin'.
But isn't that just a setting down of good memories...letting them gain dust.




2/26/13


That cold rain outside is pouring down. But it's alright, some days go awry. 

Do you miss how the candle flickers- above whispered letters that soft bodies make before dawn? ; the electric room of making love. Smiling upon waking.






.

2/19/13

a dream.

I just want a small house, hidden by trees, that slopes down to the water's edge of a creek off the Bay. 
A dark wood cabin inside; where daylight peeks warm yellow light through cream curtains with the morning's tea…and at night seems like magic, dimly lit and inviting.
When it rains, there's a so-soft quilted couch in the main room to get lost in. 
A place where I can paint. Coming home from a day's work of designing. Photographs everywhere. A sailor's home. 

Then in the evenings, when friends stop by from their travels; I'll light the lanterns in the backyard. And we'll sit in rain-dried chairs and talk quietly with the sound of the waves - about literature and lost loves, who we used to be, and how much happier life is now. --- Like the 'ole tavern they stop by for one night before movin' on home. 


That's what I'm working towards. 


/ / / 



2/12/13

My Ghost

Think you're just my ghost.
Leaving the faintest trace of touch that's really worlds away. Troubling the mind into a whispered silence.

So I burn the incense and say the earthly blessings, thinking that if all the beautiful rhymes would work this time - in all that soft-hue sweetness of morning --- that the tremor won't go up my spine.
You'll be lost in that receding fog - and I'll be free of the haunting.
Cause your dreams - I want them for you. Want you to have your ever after. Maybe I should be looking up to the stars with a distant smile, thinking something about them seems familiar to some warm, wonderful memory. And nothing more. Maybe?

But it all comes alive in the depths of too-dark-to-see. Feels like fluttering. The shadows dance across the maple headboard and disappear.
Waking up covered in sweat, swallowing hard - trying to breathe. Shoving the sheets off the bed entirely. But nothing's wrong! Just the tapping at the window of a little pine. Apparently it's making up hardships to feel like the old self.
So I start to laugh at myself lightly.
Hearing slowly the sound of night, in my place, all around - the soft putters of night,  the wind howling with such a force, --- so let it howl and shake me calm.
Haunted in the stuff of letters. Not an answer comes to the lips yet unkissed of this.
And still it keeps feeling so good.


/ / /
Sigh. Oh constellations - tell me which way you're leading the turnings of that ochre sliver moon out tonight. Devilish grin like at once known. I look up and say "touché" to him.
Saying this quiet happiness is all true as kept promises. Saying nothing's going nowhere. Shimmer with delight.
Thinking of that ghost of mine -- like when you swear a smell from childhood strolls past you in the dusk.

/ / /
And in the daylight afterall, it does always come so quick and tiring, --- maybe all the fables do fade. What's that I was trembling with fear of? Mind has a tendency to roll the seas onward at the sound of a voice.

/ / /
So! Douse me in mud and crushed flowers, cause all's anew. Can't deny, through all the lack of things to share -- the air keeps on smelling so sweet. The smiles so easy, the laughter so much fuller.
And that's all more than I could say in awhile.

So ghost of mine - keep haunting.
Feel the gush of words and cherish it. I'll keep looking for that Peter Pan in midnight, and calling it nothing.



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2/6/13

"November" stills


Stills are up (hooray!) for the short film "November" that I worked on as production+costume designer from about August to December of 2012.

Check them out on the film's Facebook Page by clicking here! 

A few weeks ago my brother sent me the raw cut which I forwarded to our sound technician, and a close fellow filmmaker friend for any notes...and to share in the excitement. It was a fun project, not without it's large bumps-in-the-road like every film has, but an opportunity created to get the grand group together of the folks I'm blessed to call my filmmaking team, and friends.

Read my post-wrap blog post by clicking here.  // "The memories still gloriously looping - going back to - still looking up into - the silver walls, late in the night....as the room burns with the sizzle that equipment lights make after the film shoot is over. Zapping the frenzied fragments you remember between the leaps up&down stairs --- making sure everything is just right, yeah it's all right -- clad all in black and letting the night just roll over..."

/ / /  And just last week, all involved in the project were sent a link to the FINAL cut! Can't share it on here just yet though, as it'll be going into festivals submissions for 2013/2014...


Recap







"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday

with wonder, thinking their parents  had lived smooth, stabilized-within-the-photo lives

... never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, 

our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.

All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful

forms of ignorance."


- Jack Kerouac, On the Road





/ / / Took a trip through an old photography series (above^ or CLICK HERE) with my morning tea today. And it's such a funny thing to say "old" since this era was so much of my writings on this blog. And so much of a constant inspiration for all the films that followed. 

All the places these souls went afterwards. We even lost one forever. But we learned of love, and we learned that you could really, truly, if you wanted --- share it all at once, feel everything the dark world had to offer, ......and then pack up the carnivale and move on to your own, so uniquely different, dreams. We're all such different people now. 

What a story that time was, which you can never quite tell just right, can never go back. But it really was that great.


CLICK each title BELOW to READ some of those old writings...

•  "Ignorance" on 10/18/09













1/18/13

"Sea witch"



#fridaynight working on another branding project for NPL...my own!


1/17/13

Drawing Cameras


Spent this morning at the office drawing vintage cameras for a new NPL tshirt design to be worn at this year's upcoming trade shows. I am loving that everything is getting a fresh face for 2013! 


"It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on." - Jack Kerouac


The Way We Were


Last night I had a thought of us in old-age days  ---- saw myself sitting down to an old oak desk (on the garden side of the house & setting the mug of tea down), to write you another letter. 
Telling of the month's good work, the kid's forts and the memories I'd been having lately of when we were young. 

Writing to you while you're somewhere - in some form of mountains -  faraway in this wide world we love. And I'm picturing how my former dearest will read the words while sitting on a rock, and smile.


---- And I don't know if that's the sweetest premonition - or the saddest one I've ever had.


1/16/13

Happy New Year!...and new look!


Sometimes it starts with the smallest thing. 


This little (but big purchase) Olympus pen camera has inspired lots of ideas --- mainly, to get back to the photography I loved shooting the most -- documenting candid portraits, places and nights. 

Can't believe I started this blog FIVE years ago (whoa) and that people have been reading it from the start!! Will continue to write in prose as always --- to share beat stories of dimly lit nights with the artists+friends in my life, and the adventures of all sizes and places. TO WRITE, always.

However - there's lots of projects already in the works for 2013 ....and my idea is to EXPAND this blog into a full scope of my work - from design, to film work, to travel and yes - photography.
There's even a link now to my Pininterest board on the left!


Thanks for stopping by! Hope everyone enjoys the new look! 

Here's to 2013, and all the adventures ahead!