22 days and counting...

My yin and I leave on our honeymoon three weeks from tomorrow, and I find myself not unlike a cat, long-tailed and neurotic, in a room full of:

Apparently, photographs provide little relief to cliché;

.tnoi
peht
edis
ebsi
siht
tub

The point is
that last year
I was doing less
backmasking and
writing more poesy:

just got home.
just decided to write.
just talked with my yin.
just a mild case of poetry.
just listened to two messages.
just remember this is all a game.
just ten months until the wedding.
just one year until i finish my thesis.
just wonder what i will dream tonight.
just six weeks until we leave for summer.
just stacking one word on top of the other.
just don't care so much for right from wrong.
just regurgitating a form Saylor once admired.
just a sliver between the imaginary and the Real.
just thinking La Cienega leaves for India tomorrow.
just recounted a cadence on the beach in September 2007.
just saw the swirling hypocrisy of time wither in the blink of an eye.
just recounted a cadence on the beach in September 2007.
just broke my own rule about using "friend" as a verb.
just remembered the mid-February Fear of 2009.
just fifty-two minutes until my sister's birthday.
just wondered if Mercury is still in retrograde.
just learned Jache is flying for Africa tonight.
just spent four hours in a bar not drinking.
just experienced a parking lot revelation.
just learned my old roommate moved.
just "friended" my divorce attorney.
just have one research paper left.
just had french fries for dinner.
just read a rejection letter.
just turned off my phone.
just saw an apparition.
just stopped.

And the year before like:

I.

I drove home last night thinking about
marriage, ceremony, and ritual,
commitment and obligation,
thinking about dharma.

I thought about the moment hidden in the pomp,
the moment obscured by circumstance:

the moment two becomes one.

I thought about impermanence,
how every thing that has a beginning
will surely have an end.

I thought about the real,
the eternal, the unchanging.

I thought about what I have to offer this union.

No one can give you anything
that you do not already have.

Not peace,
nor security,
nor wisdom,
nor wealth
is lacking.


II.

Then what is the meaning of this marriage?


Is it a dress?

(once worn)

Is it a ring?

(tarnished)

Is it a Saturday evening in May?

(raining)

Is it ‘til death do you part?

(death is not an ending)

My wish for you, S____,
My wish for you, N_____,

is that
on those
worn
tarnished
rainy
days
you

remember

love has no beginning,
love has no end.

[lapse]

But this year, at least on this day, there's not a poem in sight. Instead I find myself in bookstores buying road maps and thrift stores buying books and half-lying about my consumption.

I am listening (truly) to a Chinese pop song:

And this, amazingly, is not beside the point, though I have no idea how it connects to all the other dots and circles running around my head right now. I've been able to meditate more this week than I have in the past month, and it's been amazing to watch all the various dreams and memories and visions and desires – repressed and otherwise – bubbling to the surface.

I've been watching Twin Peaks before bed each night, and someday my blog will have something to say about that.

to be continued...