The tide gathers trash in the corners of the dock, here in my corner of Baltimore’s harbor, by the walls that raise us above the water; it quietly floats, a fragile surface that appears as if it would support a hesitant foot in motion. But to do so would be to find it is but pieces, a story with only characters and an ending; each thought a fading sentence without predicate, a child that falls as it runs down the steps, face in the gravel, only to rise and continue toward the water. You would think God would have a giant net to skim this surface; to let the fish beneath be given a chance at oxygen and algae without eating cigarette butts, and the mallards that swoop, almost lost amongst the cold concrete and pylons that shape the ledge just beyond them, a chance at the fish. Maybe it will happen, maybe it will just take longer than a day; a gentle curve that slopes inconspicuously down the radius of a mountain. It would be nice just to glide down, but speed requires deceleration for control. We have rose to the top of that mountain and mined the depth of the sea, still the harbor where they meet becomes the hole where what was deemed useless beholds its resting place. You can’t make a river run straight, just trust it will end somewhere downhill.

There came a point when I couldn’t distinguish between McDonalds and Burger King as the empty bags floated in front of me, they all sell the same thing. They were bits and pieces of songs, fragments of a melody that passed through my ears like sun raging from behind thick clouds and dirty windows. The pieces swirl, I gather them and continue. They reconcile the past and I find I have been looking for her for years. The abrupt change from being the overly defensive soldier, always the first to attack, back to the quiet medic, willing to accept healing as the only viable option. There are only beginnings, even as the flight lands or song ends. There can only be resurgence, loud guitars riding a furious beat, floating organ and a chorus of deep bass. We can go home. It was like high school or before, that first kiss on a dark dance floor in the schools gymnasium, rising toward the first taste of glory and the awkward pressure that leaves you consumed and drained. It used to be an endless fascination with consumption, what the other person felt, and a self doubt that was a bloated stomach spewing like the sun over paradise. Now it is ‘she will exist’, the questioning, not worrying; now is how we will move. Is it time for the possibility of ashes rekindling under the cool springs breeze to burst mercilessly into flame? A slumbering breeze that rises from the dark of New Years, the sweet cocaine that replaced snow last winter, the alcohol, the dance, the work that came before the sun should have rose on me.

Yes, I did survive, a tattered card that was shuffled and dealt again. The warden let us dance and sing, albeit a different dance and songs in a language that was vague, but almost familiar. We no longer pilgrimage to the tiger, the fringe and the caves that lie in silent wait. We wait sometimes outside of that roadhouse, but know we really belong within. Its walls carved scrimshaw that depicts glories never attained, where both bone and action have fallen short of potential. Trees line far away roads, the only direction that movement still takes place. Some people want to be crippled, broken down, and cared for, not us. We line up, cattle, since elementary school, single file against the lockers, fastening the clasps to hold down a body bent on projection. We wave our flags, wilder, prouder, now that we see a weakness that is inherent to freedom. Only when we join the wagon train that forces itself to jump back do the halls become crowded and the eyes that stare at our movement become empty. The song dances in its own right, the roulette wheel free from the hand of the croupier.

Have you ever felt like you found your home in a field, or in a car riding toward West Palm Beach, or in a person? A comfort, a fire burning to warm the cold hands that are forever our truest connection to others; our feet that of a wanderer, crossing thresholds of doors that are always open. Where we find a shelter against the pain that rages in open wounds, the wind that spirals around us, a place to rest your head and be lost in the Satori of motion. Even the thief can learn to love and he will, but only when he can forgive the trespasses he committed, the love he so vehemently fought. Those who don’t, like the king who stole everything, will pay for the dark horse that rides their souls, the tide from their vanity flooding the streets of the kingdom. The flowers all know, but only the violets and daffodils will acknowledge; open and make love to thick mud and rain, be born in grasses to wake the dark pasture and make it scream into a meadow. How do we distinguish between what is a beautiful moment, a place captured in time, and the impetuous for a life that was never considered? Is it only by time we measure in phone calls, glasses of wine, and slow dances to Sarah Vaughn in her darkest glory? How do we order a past informed by the dried ink and brittle paper of history? Should I walk this road or turn and run home? Will it be an example of what the attraction should create or a quiet ending to a flame that raged at the moon?

It’s Thursday night, one of those nights when I remember I can find the words, be they crumbled and barely legible or bold and screaming from the tree that allows night to creep up from behind the sun.  I don’t know if I believe in poetry anymore, if there are songs that can speak out the innermost feeling, I think they often just flutter along the outskirts and we assign some deeper meaning with a comfort only found at the edge or when lying ravaged.

When I was a child I knew, at seven, or eight, that I wanted to be a poet; I didn’t know what a poet was, but it seemed that the rhyme and reason went so hand in hand that there wasn’t much of a choice.  I am older and know now that I just want the poetry, not to necessarily be the medium. I want to see it rise from some benign catalyst and come flooding out as I try to stand and control it only to get lost in the ecstasy of the image; like a faucet, a hot and cold running love affair ——- On & OFF, ON & OFF, ON & OFF —- over a sink in a basement, installed and forgotten except when you have to venture down.

I often think of Sara, the woman who never speaks in The Eolian Harp, how she plots the latent’s manifestation in a world populated by archetypes and gods; where biology, religion, line, and melody are fused to create a landscape, this strange dark where we chase our shadows beyond the street in exhaustion. Her silence is where all words dwell, where we can pick a few, give them form, a shape, and a name. It becomes a poem that now will rest, for a day or a month and then tell me whether it is real, that will offer up salvation in the tiny pool of water I cradle in my hands.

Often times, the lines of aesthetic reception and mass, popular culture flow together in a stream of interrelation. In other words, what is found artistically favorable is rooted in the perception of the given culture in a specific space and time. The state of technology, itself an aesthetic form, can become an erotic personal intermingling of beauty and the sexuality of the body that is reflected in our own sense of cultural perception; technology has become this culture’s art form. Specifically, in our complete concentration on the media, we exemplify the artistic critic, as we would study the contours of a sculpture or the specific color usage in a painting. This sense of aesthetic is tellingly specific to culture, for the technology has become a materialized canvas. Its form is everywhere one looks, it is inescapable. Thus, just as there is a certain quality, a beauty in other art forms, the same can be found in technology. We are subjugated by its assault daily. In the union of body, computer, television, and Ipod, and an almost art-like intimacy found in social networking we exemplify the quality of technological aesthetic; there is a co-habitation of aesthetic reception with mass culture. There is a direct correlation between how society view things, in this case art, and how society functions as a whole. There is a symbiosis between the two, between mass culture in general, and the ways in which art is perceived. Each directly affects the other. Great innovations transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. All of the old catalysts for art— genius, creativity, mystery and eternal value— have all become outmoded in a society of reproduction and mass consumption; where once only food, water and electricity were the bare necessities, so have audio and visual images permeated not simply into society, but into our very homes. Clearly the link between the reception of art and mass culture becomes even stronger, when art becomes readily available at any given time or place. With reproduction, aura and tradition are completely removed from the work of art that brings about both contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind itself; the perception of art is directly related upon the culture that views it. In the case of modern mass culture, the void where ritual once stood in relation to art has been replaced by politics. Rather than relegating art to the realm of ‘cult object’, it has become a tool for the manipulation of thoughts, beliefs and behavior of society. Just as the words became easily reproducible, turning the reader into the writer, at least in the case of “Letters to the Editor” so does the reproductability of art turn the observers into the arts. Reproduction of art has changed the reactions of masses to it from reactionary to progressive, and in doing so, brought about a change in the very notion of art itself….

The problem with writing poetry on a computer is that, unlike a typewriter, there is no pull out time to stop the flow (like when you had to put a new sheet of paper in or use the erase tape). The computer will allow any train wreck, even those that can be stopped by the pause.  The pause of feeling from the sliding in of the new sheet of paper and, turning the wheel to pull it up so it may be typed on, allowing you to evaluate before you unpause and continue for 80 some lines (that afterward you cut 50% of 50% out of  —- leaving barely a skeleton). When we continue the thought must be held in our head while waiting for another sheet of paper; one that will be marked and mulled when we stop typing and again revise. To stop the train wreck we embrace in word processing I just take a deep breath (like I just did) and let the train slow down, let the running water of words hold to a trickle for a second, to actually see the storm lashed bay we write about, some would say inform and control.  I don’t believe it; if you put a rose somewhere it is going to do what it is going to do, but you aren’t going to change the truth of it —- that is why we may seek out a rose, or a bug, or a doorstep to be the center of a universe you have been invited, and perhaps convinced, into to, even though you know its not real, suspension of belief I think is the screen writing term. The rose comes as easily as the mushroom, after rain, only the mushroom searches for kinship in a different way, not by stretching its head to the sun, but by communing with rock, a rock that has known flesh, that wishes only to be united with that which it struck, to stop the bleeding and be warm and be whole.  You get these things sometimes, when I need a larger audience, but I really just want to be silent for the most part, lost in the image and the prosody it creates….

There is a picture made from a leaf and marker hanging on the wall above my desk.  At the bottom it reads Cayanne Love. Twenty five years ago I would have laughed at the simplicity of this picture. When I was 13 the walls of my bedroom were covered with posters and pictures from magazines, poems torn from library books and handwritten aphorisms I’d read. It never occurred to me then that someday they would be replaced by sheets of copier paper scribbled with crayon and haphazardly constructed pictures of foam stickers and cut out shapes.

For the past 2 years the walls of my house have become a gallery for the art of two aspiring artists, one standing on the verge of six and the other three and a half. What for the first months we lived here were bare have become a crowded gallery that pays homage to the day to day concerns of the very young. The walls are a blank canvas in themselves that have become bursting with life.

During this past summer is when we really began to fill the empty spaces.  I was unemployed and each day we did an art project of some kind. Now, with the girls in school most days, I find myself longing for the chance to cut shapes from paper or slip in a lesson on time by making a paper plate clock. Surprisingly I even miss the mess and inevitable spilling of painting. But maybe more then anything I miss the chance that art gave me to teach and interact with my girls on a very deep level. It made us the Three Mouskateers, as Cerise says, and showed them something I had forgotten how much I loved.

Still I never thought of myself as an artist.  I spent several years of Saturdays when I was a pre-teen at The Maryland Institute in downtown Baltimore taking art classes and alot of that had somehow laid dormant until I began to think about how to fill the hot hazy afternoons of an Eldersburg summer. The joy and pride that shines through with each touch of brush to canvas or crayon to paper even now brings a smile to my face.

I watch as the silly beliefs I had in art have melted like an ice cream cone in August.  The idea that art must have meaning or even have the veracity to cause a fundamental change in the world. Now I know that true art must before anything be an expression of joy and that is what my children exude in page after page of stick figures and scribbles that are roller coasters or castles. The walls of my house are the most beautiful walls I have ever been surrounded by, adorned with a thousand mystical stories that only I and my girls could retell.

A friend of mine came over and said “I don’t know if I’d let my children just hang pictures so haphazardly all over the house.” I asked “why, it makes them happy, but even more importantly it makes me happy.” My friend said “Well I like my living room to be my space, their room is one thing, but you have pictures all over.  Where is your space?” I thought about it a minute and said “This is my space, what else would I want to be surrounded by.”  Our conversation turned to where to have lunch but I kept turning over in my head the idea that you wouldn’t want your walls covered by a thousand masterpieces, that you may rather have blank walls staring at you.

Then it came to me, I have always loved to cover my walls with pictures and stories, it just took me growing up to find ones that truly made me happy.  Ones that were simply because someone wanted to put pencil to paper and create, without forethought to what was being done, lost in the process not the meaning.  I still have a copy of Elizabeth Bishops One Art on my pantry door and a poster of Professor Longhair behind my desk, but they are surrounded by pictures of princesses and our family that would only be recognizable to the hand that created it or the father who takes such pride in displaying it.

I have been waking up early on Sunday, before 6, and going to mass.  It’s been a quarter century and I have come back to my Roman Catholic upbringing; I went to confession and have been taking communion.  It is strange, foreign yet familiar, and I am scared. 

I stopped going to mass when I was 13, my mother was angry at God for the death of my cousin and I was angry at God for letting my cousin molest me.  My maternal grandmother was devout, praying novenas for me year after year, and she loved my cousin, more then me I thought, and I didn’t understand. So, I blamed God, turning my back on the community and comfort of the church in favor of marijuana and LSD.

This lead me down many dark roads and to try any drug you can think of at least once.  I felt death wrap its hands around me more then once and saw God pouring down as I tried to commit suicide in music. I hated God, the church, and everything it represented..  The ceremony and ritual seemed to go against the truth I had read in the bible and the idea of having to go and worship every Sunday seemed like jumping through hoops. 

I found a moral compass in myself, it is something felt and followed if you believe in your internal goodness.  Why did I need to go to church and have someone tell me what it meant to be a good person who walked right?  So I turned my back on the whole idea and found spirituality in other ways; a blade of grass, the last rose of summer, a song. And as long as I was high those things were enough.

Two years ago I walked away from the altered space I had dwelled in for 20+ years.  I began to grow up and finally matured emotionally from the 13 year old I was when I chose to numb the pain of my childhood with drugs.  My body had become that of a man but my head was still an angry kid who was lashing out at the world. It took a lot of painful soul searching, the dissolution of my marriage and forgiving God..

The soul searching was in short a complete psychological reevaluation of everything I believed.  It made me see that I was a self-loathing, sad person who had latched onto a culture that seemed, at the time, to provide me with warmth and companionship.  It didn’t judge me and kept me in the stagnant pool of thought that says it’s ok to ‘follow your heart’.  You should be true to yourself but when you have children there comes a sense of duty that must be embraced.  This sense of duty informed me that my happiness was secondary to my daughters needs and I might need to do things for them that I wouldn’t do for myself. 

I didn’t plan on quitting drugs, I woke up one morning and didn‘t get high, went about my day and went to bed.  I woke up the next day, didn’t get high…. After about a month I didn’t even think about getting high. This is when my life fell apart.  I looked at my wife one day and realized I didn’t know who she was.  Our relationship began with a bottle of vodka and an oxycodon  and was a blur of cocaine and alcohol. It ended one Monday in July 2008 when she left.  I packed up and left the house we had shared with my daughters that Thursday and the three of us moved to my mother’s house 

She wouldn’t let go of her past, she resented being married and her ‘boring’ life.  She wanted to be a woman in her twenties, out and about on the town, making the scene.  Her life inevitably changed for the worst in her eyes by getting married.  The sense of this was palpable and she sought out what she wanted in a person who would let her be herself. I didn’t understand and immersed myself in my children’s lives and became detached  from her, I looked on her as a manifestation of everything I had rebuked. It caused a war within me. I knew that it was best for my wife and me to be together for our children, but if we lived two separate lives it would never work. She felt it too and decided that it was better for her to just run from our problem as opposed to trying to fix them.

It took a long time to find some peace and comfort, I spun up and down through the grieving process for over a year; from anger, to bargaining, to denial, to depression until I finally found acceptance.  I studied Buddhism and it showed me many ways to forgive her for the perceived violations she had committed against me and our children but  it took forgiving God to ultimately free me from the past.  I had to struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, to do this and the way came to me when reading a book called Strong Fathers / Strong Daughters by Meg Meeker. There is a chapter on God.  The author is relating what a woman who survived Auschwitz said about God ..

“God didn’t make the camp or kill the Jews.  The mistake He made was giving men free will and the brains to figure out how to torture people.  I knew that He hated Auschwitz more than I did.  Many of us had faith.  We needed hope. Whether we made it out alive or not, we needed to know that somehow, some way, life would be better.  Would it be heaven? We didn’t know what we thought.  But God gave me hope and that kept me alive. I couldn’t afford wasting energy on hating Him.”

From there I ended up going to mass one Sunday a few months back. It is comforting and I find giving myself to God, thinking about what is said, being absorbed in the ritual, is a way to stay focused on the challenges of my life a single father. I find that it also helps me to know that there is a community for me, one that expects things of me beyond ‘following my heart’. Beyond that, though, my real reason for going is that sense of duty I feel to my daughters.

It is said that talking to your children about religion is second only to talking about sex on the uncomfortablity scale. I don’t have a problem saying what I need to my girls but I also feel that living by example is the greatest way to reinforce in them that God is there and loves them. Cayanne and Cerise need to be taught a faith in God, because life will inevitably take them to a place where I can not help them.  Do I want them to be alone when they are there or willing and able to put their trust in something greater then themselves?  I will not always be there when they feel emotionally rejected, abandoned, or just misunderstood.  Where will they find security then, will they have something strong, loving, and secure to hold them?  I know that I will not always be there for them and I want to give them something to turn to other then drugs or sex like I did.