a summer evening in Baltimore the wind picks up i'm sitting outside at a cafe and the wind reminds me of a moment half a world away, sudden wind rippling the surface of zen garden pond shattering the reflection of mountains and breaking something in my mind like dropping a glass bottle and letting the genie out
a bottle of water floating in the sea suddenly shattering
nothing is lost and the whole ocean is gained in an instant
the wind here the same as the wind a half a world away
Zelda's Inferno exercise: we wrote words and phrases on index cards, placed them around the room for others to find, then wrote from what we found.
1) "tina turner on acid yodeling in arabic": strange dreams of late-night TV rock opera mixed with the CNN headlines I fell asleep in front of, Tina Turner as the Acid Queen morphing into a ululating woman in a burqua, wailing over another senseless death / my mind flipping from CNN to VH1 and finding satisfaction in neither, Tommy can you hear me? 25 killed in a car bomb attack. That deaf dumb and blind kid, and now to the White House for an address by the "President", you won't find me any of those ways, although you think you must
2) "Booger": Booger-brain! Poop-head! Childhood curse insults, unselfconscious, heartfelt anger, hatred...I remember my mother telling me "children don't hate", but no, only children can hate, grown into it but not yet past it (and so many children in adult bodies!) the purity of passion without compassion, the lord of the flies, the boys who beat me and spit on me, the hatred I knew then, a more pure and refined poison than anything I've known since; I hated then as I cannot hate now.
3) "beautiful in the overused meaningless way": I can't call you beautiful, that word is worn out, overused, meaningless, no tread left on it, I want a special edition vocabulary, words you have to earn the right to use, words with some kind of artistic cover charge to keep the riff-raff out, words that cost two months salary, words I had to bleed for, words I had to scale mountains and fight dragons to have the right to use...instead all I have is this thesaurus...attractive, cute, good looking, gorgeous, handsome, lovely....Give me words that cost me a year of my life each to use, that I can tell you how I feel.