Brave little ship...

The Blooms of Spring
set merry sail
and sought adventure
without fail
Many kegs of rum
were drunk
and many dreams
cheerfully sunk
The parrot and the
albatross
tallied up each
gain and loss
And rudderless
it did embark
Fearlessly
into the dark
It fought a storm
both aft and fore
To find its home
upon a distant winter shore...

(a poem dedicated to my other self)

somewhere....

Somewhere in time
somewhere in space
two stars collided
one fell from grace...

Ophelia at the Crossroads

Nearly every mistake robs somebody and gives to somebody else....

More than a year ago, I gained a friendship through mistaking someone for someone else... I have grown and learnt and gained through this connection. I am deeply grateful for it and believe (as soon as I began to realize the truth) that this mistake was a divinely inspired happy accident. It was, on some level at least, meant to be...

But at the same time, it is haunted by the 'not meant to be' of the error in judgement. It keeps stumbling over the loose thread of the other person.... the lost connection... I feel that the mistake runs like a faultline through the friendship. The energy of the mistake still lurks in some dark corner, biding its time. It warped something, distorted something, and even now, I am partly afraid that fate will someday snatch it back again. The fear echoes in my extreme reluctance to reach out to anyone... to publically befriend anyone.... It impacts on other connections....

For this reason, I have been wondering - what will happen, energetically if I go back to the crossroads....

My concerns are twofold:
- will the 'wronged' person forgive me?
- will I lose a friendship (that has meant a lot to me), because it was gained in error?

Or is it possible to hope for the best of all possible outcomes, that attempting to balance a wrong of many months ago, will also cleanse, purify and heal the bad energy that shadows the other side....

Review: What a Wonderful Dangerous Place by Dan Pocengal

First, it's confession time. About fifteen to twenty years ago, I was a heavy subscriber to the whole guitar hero sub-culture created by such icons as Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen. I hated and mourned the arrival of grunge and annoyed people no-end with my quoted guitarisms.

Dan Pocengal's solo instrumental album 'What a Wonderful Dangerous place' could easily have fitted the genre. I discovered Dan's website because of his involvement in the Midnight Project, but I found very quickly that I would have liked his music even without that connection. Leaving a message about how much I loved his music, led to a correspondence that took me by surprise on a number of levels, touching on various aspects of spirituality, perception, reality and a whole lot more. Insights shared gave me the benefit of familiarity with a lot of symbolism in his music and in the images on his website, but since this is really meant to be a review, I guess I better say something about his guitar playing.

In the days when I devoured guitar magazines, one of the ongoing debates revolved around tone vs shredding speed, the general consensus being that you had either one or the other. Having said this, though, Dan Pocengal can certainly shred both meaningfully and moodfully, without sacrificing tonal quality.

A number of tracks are noteworthy. 'Mouthful of Tail' expresses the frenetic, chaotic activity of creation which is symbiotically linked to its shadow-aspect of destruction. 'Transmutation' also offers a glimpse of Dan's acoustic mastery. (One of my favorite 'other' numbers by Dan is an unplugged gem called 'Monastery Bells' which used to be on his website, but is not included here.) 'Orbital Junction' carries the slightest suggestion of melodic industrial music... without losing the primary soaring indentity of prog metal guitar. Despite its brevity, Star-Heart Wanderer is filled with beautiful movements and progressions. To discover the multi-dimensional wonder of 'What a wonderful Dangerous Place' for yourself, go to Dan Pocengal's website.

Well worth a buy if you love the electric guitar.

Gauntlet

I never held my father's hand
but I have his gauntlet
Brought by survivors from his warband

And every year I grew a bit
I stuffed wool and straw into his gauntlet
But I could never make it fit...

Rage and blood
watered this soul
and filled it up
and made it whole
and the man became
a fearsome thing
and the gauntlet fit
where steel and iron sing

But that was then
the monster broke
to free the man inside

and some of him
was lost forever
with the passing of blood's tide...

Thank God the gauntlet rusts
Thank God I have no son
my daughter counts the fingers lost
and strokes
what remains
when she's done

(The vague idea of this poem/song has been with me for many years. The original title was 'The Gauntlet No Longer Fits' and it has something to do with outgrowing your battles, but although I had the idea, I only completed it very recently. I wrote the first two verses some time last year, because I saw it in my head and realized finally that it was a progression of different stages in someone's life. Then it rested, until the second half of May 2012, when I saw the rest fitting into their slots, like puzzle pieces. Is peace possible despite wounds and scars of battles past, or because of them? t.y.m. for helping....)

My drabble: Birds of a feather

"Hey!" she said.

Her words reverberated through the emptiness of the apartment. What was there? Mattress. Kettle. A souring carton of milk. Some drying stems of lavender on the window sill.

"I love this T-shirt. Can I borrow it?"

'Love' took a distinct slot in the meaning chain of her vocabulary. Love meant want and want was never a passive word with her.

Everything cool I owned was either borrowed or stolen, but facing the pure onslaught of her 'love', I suddenly understood why magpies built their nests high in the branches.

Was this how magpies mated? I shrugged. "Whatever."

(this story was specifically created as a writing exercise for a meeting with the Adamastor Writer's Guild, on the subject of drabbles, which are, for those who don't know, a story that is exactly 100 words long. You can check out Cat Hellisen's drabble  for the same meeting here. )