Author: acolorito (Page 4 of 9)

The New Light

November 27, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I sit in the same spot every morning with my coffee and my thoughts.  Vito lies at my side breathing in the stillness.   Books sit face down with open spines, exposed to my markings, waiting for light to lift the words up into me.  Wristwatches are nearby recording time, some in sync with the now and others stopped during a forgotten moment. 

I set down a turquoise carton of coconut water and watch the sun, rising through the glass doors, play with the topical reflections I see shifting from the simple cardboard container into memories of blonde sand and seductively leaning palm trees.

Next to the arched books sits a cylindrical leather case with small tools inside.  The leather is cracked brown cowhide.  This is designed to hold pencils and pens, a child’s receptacle for school.  I use it to hold small screwdrivers, spring-bar tools, case-back knives to fix watches.  There are also a host of tiny surgical tools taken from other settings like forceps and hemostats and polishing tools with abrasive edges. 

 The tools are all collected in this cracked brown leather case with worn ripples, aging seams and wrinkles around the patina where antique beige stitching holds. The new light comes in and cuts new dimensional interest into the character crevices of the leather shining back alternating matte textures and burnished edges.  The tool case leans to one side with its top unzipped revealing the black and red plastic handles of its contents.

 There are many imaginative tools used to extend my hands inside there.  Art is extending the hands into a new domain.  Rallying thoughts migrate and actions form in the fine-motor memory of my hands.  The space where hands reach and extend with a tool, brush or pen unlocks an unconscious barrier trapped within.  Oceanic clusters in unconscious dreams marry tangible shapes and words to mold and admire.

The leather holds on to the new light.  Tools are secure. The day enters over my shoulder through the glass.   I see beauty in the worn edges and the cracks that remind time to tell me again to appreciate what surrounds me.

Eye Contact

October 22, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes I’m afraid

To look into your eyes

To lock on to your essence

It is too beautiful

It clutches all I have

 

I feel it too much

I become scared

That your inner hand

Won’t like the feel of all of me

 

Then I open my eyes more

And my heart

Pulls down the sky for you

And I warm you in my blue gaze

So it is just our eyes

Finding where the fear ends

The Demolished Surgeon

October 16, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I walked out of a meeting today and stood transfixed in the parking lot watching an excavator tear down a house across the street.   Once I saw the scene I couldn’t move.   I was unable to lift my foot for another step.   The base of the excavator on its rolling conveyor leaned and tilted atop a seven-foot pile of splintered wood and debris.

 

Its giant frontal jaws on the articulated arm reached and extended with its serrated mouth open like a fabricated industrial tyrannosaurus attacking the body, walls and roof of the house.   Within minutes jagged remnants of splintered wood, and shards of glass, along with the entire roof in one segment, were dragged  mercilessly, crumbling to the ground.   The operator of the construction vehicle was serenely positioned at the controls working calmly like he was sitting at a computer.

 

I felt unable to avert my eyes.   There were components of my life in that house.   Though I had no relationship with the residence I felt like inner secrets from my past were on display here in a slow-motion calamity being warmed by the sun.   I witnessed pieces of my failed marriage splintering into oblivion.

 

As the open-toothed bucket on the attacking arm of the wrecking apparatus pulled the roof off in one piece,  I felt a memory of sadness and an inner sense of shame generated from abandoning my medical practice suddenly four years ago.

 

It was a warm summer Monday morning four years ago.   I was driving into Portland from the Goldendale ranch where I spent the entire weekend drunk.   I drank excessively and continuously every weekend, and most weekday evenings.   It was the unbroken alcohol consumption that weekend that put me into a toxic state of withdrawal with a pernicious case of the jitters.  I was headed into a full day of surgery.   I just couldn’t do it.   I had done it many times before but this morning something had changed.    I was seized by a whole new impulse and state of mind.   Years of hiding and emotional distance suddenly came into my awareness with such acuity that I became compelled,  with no doubt,  to walk away from medicine and heal myself.   That morning I threw away a surgical practice I built up compulsively while sacrificing every other aspect of my life for fifteen years.   This moment of clarity told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was beyond choice and already in mid-departure from the life I had built for myself.

 

I continued to stare at this scene of demolition before me as if each cracked beam and crushed sheet of dry wall were elemental components of my past life.  The excavator’s jaws crushed through the wooden studs and the tensely adherent stabilizing elements of the frame while crushing sheet rock and shattering glass.   I felt my vision turn inward and clutch onto that Monday morning again where the sun drenched my intense hangover while I drove towards Portland.   I recalled,  like it was a daylight dream,  the sensation of truly having enough of a profession that separated me from my soulful inner life.

I felt splinters from that house being released by the demolition crew like they were alive piercing my flanks and charging my bloodstream with an adrenaline load that beat the musculature of my heart at the cellular level.   The sensation was the same feeling I had that Monday morning when I called my operating room nurse and informed her of my intentions.

 

My mind was now split between a dream state and the here and now.   Planks, shreds of broken wood drifted into the rays of sun, mixing with the powerful autumn reds that dominated the color palette of the street.  The walls of the house were collapsing along the sides of my vision while window frames with crushed glass like gemstones sparkled in the glare and reflected back at me memories of earnest self-destruction.   As the jaws of the excavator’s bucket savagely tore into the sidewalls after the roof was off, I devoured myself in thoughts of self-sabotage that I never believed I was capable of.   These thoughts all crowded in and came alive with a hidden sadness that was quickly overshadowed by current feelings of extreme joy in this very moment upon witnessing the final stages of the home’s degradation.

 

I now imagined myself inside the remains of the crumbling residence as a human wrecking ball.   The drama of the final stages of collapse brought forth, in my mind, a litany of unhealthy relationships.   I stood within the chaos,  confused yet awestruck,  firmly entrenched on the foundation surrounded by scattered hemlock and oak beams and plaster-rock, feeling a drenching spirit of love lost, then gained, and lost again, then gained again, always lost in the end.   The firmament under my feet  then began to sink like quick-sand and the pick-ax,  that tool of destruction in my hand,  suddenly floated away like a child’s kite let go.

 

I gathered myself and consciously returned to the parking lot intently witnessing the spectacle like the information I was taking in was vital to my life. Now in the final stages the excavator rolled and snapped on an increasing mountain of debris, tilting and threatening to topple,  its military-grade base, like a tank, securing the entire apparatus on this unstable platform of splintered wood and shattered memories.

 

A friend from the meeting joined me and laughed at how absorbed I was in this destructive spectacle.   Soon he was frozen in place, focused, in the moment, with a desire to operate this mechanical demolition tool.   We wondered where the real wrecking ball was.

 

In the end there were no wasted motions.   This device never paused or hesitated.   Every gesture, and movement was deliberate and integral to the blasting feast upon the home’s core.   Another friend drove up and stopped, watching intently from his car with a smile on his face. He simply added:

 

“Hey, that’s just like my life.”  Chuckling after the comment.

 

I felt an intense dream-like sensation of gratitude realizing we were all connected and carrying very similar emotions inside us.

A Coffin Floating on the Ocean

October 16, 2019 / / 0 Comments

My thoughts feel like they are in a casket floating on the ocean.  Random gifts and visitors.    An idea spawns itself.   A  sudden thought.   Often precious sometimes alarming.   Mined from a deep well underneath my awareness these traveling entities arrive with no willful prompting.   A crack of thunder hastens an electrical storm.   A trunk of hemlock falls into the playground of the sea drifting and fighting the tides.   Serrated waves saw the wood contouring it into shapes that defy nature.   Soon the smoothing sands and the sun’s glare polish the finished product that sits atop the bruising waves shaped as a coffin.   The waters calm.    A wave licks the  blonde sanded edge of the wood like a Golden Retriever preening.   Salt dries into a matte crystal trying to shine.  It can’t.  Clouded,  fluorescent with inclusions from the foggy depths, these salt precipitates grow like divine barnacles.  They are the oceans diamonds lighting the way.   This wooden box is a vehicle,  a transporter, a hollowed-out rough rider with knots like the heart’s fist punctuating the character of its enveloping carriage.   Souls are gathered along its course.  The random splash and gallop upon the crest’s flotsam juggles the spirits and ghosts of all those I once conversed with.   I recall meetings in dreams and hallucinations while deprived senses reached deep into the collective of childhood missions and mass idolization.   I stared into their eyes back then, felt their spirit move out of their body.  I adored,  I deified,  I regarded,  I esteemed,  I revered,  I glorified.  I even worshiped.   Worse I romanticized.  This piece of wood becomes a temporary home,  a formula for persistence where the infinite can laugh at oblivion.   Souls continue to be gathered along the way.   Beings holding passports that allow the simple taste of the continued material for a short while.  The finite ride toward the vast open oceanic spaces.   I opened my heart to those beings lost to material’s grasp.   Seemingly bereft of further communications, imprisoned inside the barren forest’s interior for centuries where time elapses into its bizarre compressions and elongations,  they found a way back.     Away from land,  away from civilization and human contact, where the oceans mammals and the gulls alternate the pulse that nourishes the spirits survival.   Trapped in this spiritual vortex voices are lofted into the fugitive winds.  Armed to travel great distances  they arrive randomly in my own unconscious intuitions hatching transitory thoughts that continue to haunt me with their unexpected arrival.

Vito On The Cross

October 4, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Vito on the cross!

 

It feels like a year

Inside the kernel of sleep

My life has changed overnight

But I am still the same man

I told you

I told you who I am

I handed you the broken bird

Grounded now

He can still fly

 

I miss your face

When you really look and search

I think of your face

Contemplate where your eyes

Find their inner conflicts

And color themselves

And

This opens new and strange thoughts about myself.

 

I’ve ransacked my emotions

My poems hurt me

While they love

I’m too sensitive

I’m too passionate

 

Do I have a friend?

I thought I told you my me

I’m an alcoholic

Sometimes I hide inside my pride

I feel you know where you hide

And change

And come out just different enough

 

I fail in my knowing,

I pray

I mistrust

I thought

I hope

I love unconditionally

I think

But ultimately yield

My desires to faith

The motive behind the motive

What is it?

Then there is

The axiom:

 

“Whenever I am disturbed, no matter what,

there is something wrong with me”

 

My hopes, my fears, my expectations, my hurt pride, my anger,

 

We live in the moment

We talked about this

Hours ago

We inhabit the moment

We have the moment

That is all

Every precious millisecond

Where time bends

Around the sculpted clay

Here

There is nothing else

 

But…

Faith and hope and dreams

Also live there in bits

These small pieces find their way in

Where promising things also

Merge with the conscious instant

You know this

It is not just the moment  alone

Barren

Lonesome

Isolated

Devoid of life’s richness inside us

 

And inside the moment

Meanings glue together

Like the connections of love

 

Why?

Why?

Did I feel those meanings start to fragment?

Stop clinging and disperse into invisibility

Last night

The moment has to stay whole

Otherwise all of that will be afraid to come together

And

Nature can’t give it birth again

Especially when it has always been…

 

Pennies and Spider’s Legs

September 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Pennies and Spider’s Legs

For Auna

 

She invites and opens

The insides of memories

With bare toes

As keys cry out

A new color enters silence

The piano string’s grooved rivets

Unravel the heart

As only

An imagined harp with its colored suspensions

Would ask for a borrowed slice of music

Trained by the wind

Where fog and sea

Reluctantly polish

The ivory sealed into the song

 

She stands at the piano

A raven born from a canvas

Hair falling over her eyes

I saw the form of an immaculate child

Musical droplets resonated

Spirited sounds like dripping ink

Bleeding only onto the black notes

Easing the fear out of the minor chords

Allaying her reminders

The phantoms of childhood

Pipe-organ anxieties of a little girl

 

Still she stood

Like a cultured reed elegantly willowed

With beauty fluted through

Bare feet pressing brass pedals

Extending each note

Pulling the child in

With memories now different

Remembering the piano as

Inside the bloom of the flower’s bell

When the metronome

Expressed the cadence for future hopes

 

 

The music sends time backwards

She stands inhabiting what she would become

Not the mystical, naïve child

Who can forget?

The nails with glued-on pennies

Fingers that grew spider’s legs

 

Inside the memory’s instant

There stands

The woman now

Who creates the brushed-keys of novel art

Ink-black hair falls over her eyes

Hair dripping away

The painful squid-ink sweat

Of things that need to go

Blending the black and ivory

Erasing the fear

From the music of memories

 

She still invites:

The pauses

The rebellions

The jagged colors

The try-me eyes

The obsession to run

The intense desires

 

Arcs of emotion pulled me inward

Toward

I couldn’t look away

It was as real

As love can ever mix with hallucination

 

 

Attention mated with illusion

I felt two epochs converge

Sepia from a child’s photo

Where wonder cannot imagine that is you

 

And the screens that obsess

Pixelated elation

A modern portrait

Still not real

 

But here was the real soul standing there

Pennies on the nails disappearing

Spider legs jousting into real fingers

 

Then the dream became real

Hands became magic

Hands that made their own tools

Brushes with their myriad pallet

Music transformed to color

A painted orchestra

Open for the high octave space

Where raven’s wings open the door

To the unexpected gifts

Of the most passionate flying

 

Blue rivers reside

Inside the sky’s red cries

And then the music became a new color

A color you might not choose

Yet it is

Arched over with kaleidoscopic rainbows

Where attitude is now colored by self-love

And the piano’s voice rang out

Speaking and living in the colors of now

And tomorrow…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forgiveness

September 27, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On the paper’s frayed edge, almost torn off, practically discarded, and set back in an emotional hideout, there are words to be spoken.

Words sprout like saplings.  They grow, become the shell encasing the heart’s underbelly, then bark sheds like snake skin and is carved into by renegade colloquial artists.

Words are still words, yet care is not taken to hold them and maintain their original shine and feed then like a growing child.

One rarely looks into the emotional life of a word: how the bloodstains and tire marks initiate the conflict in the music and the broken rules give way to risks and gamble towards a neutered prayer that extinguishes meaning while later allowing a truce.

Constructed during a long span, destined to hurt another being, these words have a time and space woven into a cup that catches everything in between:  the inchoate resentments, the astonished gestures and hidden body language pixelated artificially behind the atrocious tech-social masks.

There is knitting together in a factory that no longer exists, where the pavement’s cracked seams outside Manhattan’s eccentric emplacement cobble together a new fabric of poetry addicted to the night horizon.

Background slots in the mind’s eye where puzzles never fit were easily dissolved allowing the smoke from clouds to drip and disappear ultimately transmogrifying into pastel colors ever changing the morning drug-sky.

Words are like habits.  Habits are chameleons, always there, barely noticeable and once you learn them you’re dead. Yet soon darkness takes all of the attachments.

Words change as human sculptures emerge. Rodin knew this and dreamt the street corner where the homunculi parade born of customs mutated where nature varies timeless images inside the sharp frayed edges.

A serrated river with fixed gargoyles:  the fastened rocks around the careening waters of the witching hour bounds and hums along.   These may be the only fixed words.  Terms rooted to the earth’s rock where any change in the river’s decisions cannot loosen those interminably stubborn sentinels.  This is where thoughts can redeem or corrupt.

Still, with octaves of fear and blind eyes there is an innocent song with part of the divine that cannot attach or explain itself in the interpreted world that so few people really understand.  Often then, few take the time to  imagine that their ownership of civility becomes the loose rocks floating aimlessly in that river Heraclitus never stepped into twice.

And so the mind designs inside emotions.  Solutions are ignored.   Animal instincts sharpen the twin-edged steel and hold the braided handle and that which we explain and exploit occupies all that we have; each precious moment carries something that matters and if it hurts, then that simply is…

The Raw Sign of love

September 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I spent the morning talking and sitting and reliving memories.  Intrusive memories. Memories of her printed on that gruesome day, into writing, into hope, into a calling where I woke up surprised and bedevilled by a morning calling from Paige caught in a fright: “Dad,!  Mom is dead.”

My son’s voice in the background, “Dad please come quick Mom is dead.”

 The statements were  expressed by adults , my kids are adults, they don’t really know that they are adults and they are mired in childhood, enmeshed in a permanent childhood that their mother created  and made seem like it would prolong well into adulthood, a sea, a volcano of love , an engorgement that overcame childhood, and made the child feel like childhood persists , it never ends, it is like a carousal with mom circulating above, and the never ending  perception of being cared for is like a God in and of itself.  A Goddess where choice ventures in and takes hold, yet mother still has a stranglehold where adult choice comes hard like the concrete stoops and stairs firmholding in their awestruck being.

I am enveloped  in the great turmoil of a husband leaving Karen.

Leaving the mother

She forgot who provided for her.

She became an undying mother who forgot her kids are kids and once they are gone she only has the mate whose started it all, and she forgot that deeply and made it her passion to continue her motherhood at all costs.  I resented her for not having gratitude or the basis of what made her motherhood flourish.  I hated her,  I hated her with no excuses.  I hated her for not acknowledging me as the provider and rewarding me sexually for my hard work.  I had a major fucking resentment and I wanted to cheat but I did not.

I still had my pillars of  belief and I felt strongly that she was many things to me: 

she was many things to me

I let the hate taint everything

I let my Italian emotions embroil her passions

I let hate disregard the good

We carried hate into a new level of incomprehensible love turned into a new latitude that any compass would redirect to a colony of ultimate hope. 

 

Fervor is rekindled faith and inwardly we both knew that merciless hostility was the raw sign of love.

 

My children’s mother.

The one who they only know

The one who disappointed me on so many levels.

The mother of my children

The one I disregarded

Hated

Internalized

As the ideal that makes me unsafe

Aggressive

Disruptive to the nines

A codger

A pure Christian

A reluctant agnostic

A God fearing man

A surgeon

An athlete

A spokesman for AA

A hypocrite

A full-scale hater

A man who judges

A man who loves

A parent

A man who hates his plight

A spiritual man

A man who loves all women

A man who won’t take shit

 A man who erupts when it get to be too much

 A man turns around and loves who he hates

Because hate is the other side of love and it means love is  stronger than ever

In the end I am a man who is nothing

Be my friend or not I’m here as a man, here to be viewed and that’s it. 

The Family Amalgam

August 29, 2019 / / 0 Comments

An amalgam is forced into existence

In families

Of families

With families

Undulating in side-shows of caring

Fabricated with hateful shadows

Creeping and lurking between voices

While the best words reaching for love

Drip off lips like mercury drops of saliva

In an atmosphere of corroding realities

Dressed up for Sunday

With only the best penmanship

All gifts are taken for granted

By giver and receiver alike

While the carriage is forced off the road

By corrections and expectations shot-through

With the bullet holes of love

Always love  

I love you

Don’t you love me anymore?

Until words fall like burnt umber leaves in autumn

Fragmenting underfoot into a mulch

Bearing parts of the family’s collective heart

Disintegrating into a vapid paste for soil

And more words evolve and multiply

Born on the conveyors at church

Surrounding the pews

With revisionist crucifixions and miracles

That graduate into a mystic fodder

For an alchemy where acid tongues still

Kiss their loved ones

Like nothing happened

The Palm Trees

August 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The Palm Trees

“You see the palm trees?”   “They tell you that you can do anything, be anything.”

                                                                              Terrance Malick “Knight of Cups”

When I took my first look at the palm trees

My mind surfaced from below

I became aware apart from me for the first time

Distinct from the boy who pretended to be

A separate free interior man

It was not just the palm trees

The day was filled with everything

That everything-in-it quality

Like a bubble blown from gum that never loses sweetness

Everything had a new expanse

Opening up

As if the sky had arms expressing

To all beings

All that is fastened and adherent to this world

An open-ended reach of the moment

Echoed across the continent

And now I was here

Among the animate and inanimate

All the births of myself before me

And now I was here

Like a shock-wave

A silver slice of sunlight’s blade

Opening me up to see

What I could be

I felt everything I needed

In those palm trees with their brushes

Painting the blue into the sky

Into fragment of light

That bound and wrapped my sensitive head

Softening the sharp corners

And blindfolding me so I could see

Tearing away the gray mist of doubting thoughts

A focus back to the beginning of now

That calmed those trees

While ushering me into an electric flood of fire

I could not go wrong

There is no prescribed plan

Only sweep and barter on recognition’s promenade

Where the palms rock in the sweet wind

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