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literary legerdemain

~ an artful trick of exposition (maybe)

literary legerdemain

Monthly Archives: August 2014

Heptad of Haiku #2

25 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by griffinpoet in Heptad of Haiku, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

20140816_223957

These and other haiku may be found at hitrecord. Feel free to contribute work of your own if you’re a member of the website and have appropriate RECords!

Heat is the South’s snow.

The year is bound by blizzards,

ours invisible.

* 

To understand what

fueled God during creation,

paint sky and a wave.

* 

The trees play a prank:

they nod their heads the wind is

cool – it’s a lie.

* 

No storm, but its hues

drape by nape of gaping light,

cape to pale-necked sky.

* 

Filled with hot ink the

horizon folds making clouds

complimentary.

* 

Inside the flowers

are blue and yellow bulbs night

cannot extinguish.

* 

Every tall grass

is tombstone to a seed, but

is also its child.

 

Also, thank you for following mikhaloglu and affiliatedmindset! I appreciate your readership and hope you continue to enjoy my work! 🙂

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Short Breath for Longwinded Wednesdays #2

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by griffinpoet in Longwinded Wednesdays, Quotes

≈ 3 Comments

clocks tunne

Mimi stops talking for a second. It’s just a second but it’s a very sweet second. I think as many thoughts as I can before she starts talking again so that the second seems longer.

As I contemplated the concept of a “sweet second”, I found myself wondering if there is a new lesson here that I need to teach anyone. I realize a blog isn’t all about being didactic. In fact, some might say it’s best to steer away from the aura of mentorship altogether and focus on being entertaining. I’ve never felt the two had to be or should be exclusive though and, with regards to my own tactics of expression, I’ve more often than not felt I was being most respectful to an audience if while sharing an opinion I strove to grant insight while simultaneously grabbing for attention in a creative, interesting manner.

Anyway, that’s another blog. We’ve still that “sweet second” to talk about…

You know the “sweet second” yourself. I don’t have to introduce you. It isn’t truncating a Noah’s ark’s worth of thoughts into a single temporal space of time. Rather we usually know it as an actual “moment”, a sequence of consecutive temporal events which all seem to form a contiguous conglomerate of action. It is both the loud concert from a week ago and the silence in the car. It’s the cheering in the stadium and the hush over the golf green. It’s the dying of thirst on a long, long walk and the first sip of refreshing water when you finally get a drink.

The sweet second has a thousand faces and we recognize them all.

So, given I already know that you’re as familiar with the Sweet Second as am I, what do I have to offer you regarding it that no other person does? What is my special revelation about the Sweet Second?

My revelation is not especially new to humanity, but it is an observation that has rewarded me much so far as I’ve applied it to my own experiences. In case you didn’t know it… ALL seconds are sweet seconds and seconds don’t really have a thousand faces… they have ONE really long, ever transforming expression!

Everything that happened between the concert and the silence in the car was a sweet second. Everything between the stadium and the green. Everything between thirst and the drink.

This is important. Don’t. Miss. Your seconds.

When you learn to savor your seconds and not just your moments, you are learning to savor your part in infinity and (maybe even by extension) infinity itself. This is the practice of understanding the connection between the first breath you took and the last one you expect to take. It grounds you in the past, in the present, and in the future, and, by golly, is likely the closest you’re ever going to get to omnipresence while on this rotating ball of mud.

Appreciate infinity. Appreciate your seconds. Know that all things can be and are best apprehended when viewed as being… “Sweet!”

Speaking of sweet, here are some sweet quotes from Joe Joe Joe by Peasant:

  • [Mimi stops talking for a second. It’s just a second but it’s a very sweet second. I think as many thoughts as I can before she starts talking again so that the second seems longer.]
  • “An interruption is like a road block. That’s what Frankie says. And I didn’t stop your sentence. I got it where it was going sooner so I’d like you to thank me” Joe
  • [her eyebrows cuddle up close to each other]
  • [if my mouth corners were pointing up, Mimi would be able to say that I was being sarcastic. I don’t know what exactly mouth corners have to do with being sarcastic, but I know I’m never sarcastic. It means you’ve said something that means the opposite of what you said.]
  • “Whites don’t fit like jeans.” Joe

I would like to show my appreciation to the following new followers for their following-ness:

Thank you, ashtonlynn55, for following my blog! 😀 Enjoy following Ashton on her adventures as she finishes her 25 By 25 list and explores another country 🙂

Heptad of Haiku #1

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by griffinpoet in Heptad of Haiku, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

20140816_223957A heptad is a group of seven objects. WordPress doesn’t believe me, but dictionary.com does, so you can, too. As I like alliteration and have recently found myself writing haiku daily, I thought that I’d share my most current crop of poems with you. My hope is that even as I take time to do my Quonans and other posts, this will be something which you’ll get a chance to look at on a more frequent basis. I hope you enjoy them!

We see the Day by

sun, the Night by darkness, and

Life by perspective.

*

Hummingbirds find the

feeder in the rain and have

no fear of drowning.

*

The cloud cooled day has

covered the Earth – a damp rag

on a thankful brow.

*

Jagged tides of sky

threaten white flood. God halts it.

But beauty still stuns.

*

Our emergency

lights are more visible than

the cloaked lightning’s flash

*

If the sky is a

pond, which are its lillypads:

the clouds or the stars?

*

The sun holds hands with

a tree’s nude fingers; their white

knuckles glow like glass

 

Quonans: Conan Issue #3

01 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by griffinpoet in Quonans, Quotes

≈ Leave a comment

“As if armor would stall off Death, if he called my name!” Dunlang

As you read this, realize that we are all Greek heroes in the midst of living out our own legends. Unless either you or I are dead. If I’m dead then, presumably, this section of my myth has been mapped and I (mayhap) pursue another segment of the drama. If you are dead and reading this, then congratulations on adding a new dimension to our topic of death and exploration.

Over the past few days, death has colored my perceptions. Not for any macabre reason, I just had picked the above quote to inspire my next blog so it’s made those places and times where the subject has evidenced itself just really pop, ya know?

A key moment was my introduction to the word “catabasis” while watching a Netflix series (if you know the one, feel free to leave the name in the comments… but no spoilers, please!). It is a word which may be used to encapsulate a trip into the metaphysical underworld, often involving a search for an object or important revelation. I began thinking in terms of this method of questing and wondering how one might capture it and embark upon something similar in the real world setting.

As a lucid dreamer with a large degree of control over my own dreamscapes, I thought of using my dreams to reproduce this journey. However, I like to let my dreams pretty much do what they will, so I decided against this idea. My random researching brought me to a splice of the internet dedicated to the topic of the Thudong monks, in which the practice of corpse meditation was mentioned. Interesting though it was, it was not the direction I quite looked to take (consider that a disclaimer if you go clicking on hyperlinks for it, btw). It had occurred to me that reading some Zen death poems may be the way to go, thinking that the closest to speaking to the dead one might come is to reading the last poetic verses penned by the dying.

Somewhere around there is where it finally occurred to me.

The underworld is supposed to be a place where the personalities of those who have peopled Earth continue to persist. In the mythical sense, it is used as a backdrop for discovery, one in which those life-lost entities may still be interacted with. If we deduct the metaphysical aspect of the underworld model out, focus on these traits, then one may come to the conclusion that the living (such as the likely readership of this post) are actually in the Underworld.

Contemplate how the stories (real and imagined) of our ancients all the way up to ancestors temporally close as your own mother and father still inspire and frighten us. Every superstition we hold to, every science that has happened between fire and computer configuration, all the small nuances of our mannerisms, each and every one is an accumulation of past superstition, science, and mannerism.

We are the confluence of all the eons of humanity: the ghosts of memory preach to us and we practice out the points in their sermons. Even to turn from those points is merely a departure inspired most often by the very existence of those past thoughts.

If we choose to view life through this lens, what lesson does it provide about our lives? I think that it suggests we should recognize that our existence is itself a search for an object or an idea of infinite importance to our own personal plots. I believe that it implies those remnants of our human past which remain incarnate in superstition, science, mannerism and any other facets of the human condition are to be seen as tools through which we might accomplish the goal of our quest – learning the lesson that is our own.

And, with that, I leave you to draw your own conclusions and, perhaps, recognize the rich landscape rendered by death when it is viewed as if it were the underlying swaths of an oil painting being birthed into the masterpiece called “life”.

Also, here are the words and blurbs I found poignant in Conan #3, “The Grim Grey God”:

  • [the rearing mountains]
  • “Now comes the reaping of kings.. the garnering of chiefs like a harvest.” Borri
  • “gigantic shadows stalk red-handed across the world” Borri
  • “the kiss of a devil-born queen!” Malachi
  • “fire-fingered dawn” King Brian
  • “As if armor would stall off Death, if he called my name!” Dunlang
  • “And so the old send forth the young to die… while they make merry in their tents. Back in Cimmeria, our kings lead the charge… their broadswords in their hands. Maybe that’s because we’re not… civilized.” Conan
  • “for this is the day the raven’s drink blood!” Dunlang
  • “He cannot be dead. Live, you spineless worm… Live! LIVE!” [But there is no answer… unless one counts the mocking silence.]
  • [two cups of hatred suddenly run over]
  • “You’ll not add Brian’s lifeblood to your war-god’s goblet.” King Brian
  • “For even the gods must die… when their altars crumble… and their worshippers all are fallen.” Conan

I would like to show my appreciation to the following new followers for their following-ness:

Christine Wild with her blog book (a blook?) and sifumosher who, incidentally, used his blog to spur on writing a book as well which is now published! 🙂 Thank you for subscribing!

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