Out there

I feel sad. How can they say that love
exists only now, only today,
when I know I need to love you
tomorrow, as I have since we met?
And I know it’s been years.
If nothing else, the turning planet
proves it: Time is created by motion
and by the rhythm of a beating heart.
Some days, everything is reduced
to this, and to expectations – the
process of diagnostics. Hope exists
just in the future, whether the future
is real or not. The Now isn’t always
a place to call home.

I feel sad. Stuck in the future again.
And don’t even mention the crows
or the ocean this time.
Nothing is rising and falling all night
under a February moon or alighting
on some trembling branch of faith.
It just is what it is and I’m tired
of Fear stopping by to spoil the music
and the softened light of winter days.
I’m just sad because everything
worth loving and holding tight
with joy and gratitude is fragile,
and mortal and precious, like you.

Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving
that transcends dimensions of time and space.
Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.
– Interstellar

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed

Breathing

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Kyle Kimberlin

Breathe in and whisper God.
Breathe out and cry Oh World.
Then sigh oh short winter grass.
There is nothing we ought to do
so be still, be a creature believed
by God, before He set the Earth
to spin and Time to walk.
And what might walk the other way?
Death is too easy to write – on a page
we see it circling overhead, a flock
of dark wings. The winter sky is bright
but pale and we see the walker
coming straight ahead,
never tiring, never sleeping, day and night.
It only slows to listen if we sing.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed

The Last Day of the Circus

Posted on January 18, 2021 by Kyle Kimberlin

It’s 1am in Washington, January 19, 2021. The last day of Donald Trump’s time occupying the White House is underway. I say occupancy, not presidency, because the man never showed up for work. He didn’t just give us bad leadership; it was no leadership at all.

On January 21 2017, the day after he took the oath, Trump had a campaign rally for the 2020 election. He spent 4 years lying, whining, complaining, and tweeting about whatever was pissing him off. He was incompetent, arrogant, racist, narcissistic, and obsessed with trivialities.

When the pandemic hit, he was the only world leader who did literally nothing but blather and let people die. His only goals in 4 years were to use his office to get richer and stay in office to stay out of jail.

Trump is an adnomination before Almighty God, a shameful, selfish, pitiful excuse for a man, and an abject waste of carbon in the universe. And by all accounts he sucks and cheats at golf. It’s ironic that his business empire and personal brand are rusting and crumbling before his eyes.

If there’s any justice in this right and godmade world, Trump will go to prison. The people of America deserve nothing less than – just for once – to see some accountability for avarice, treachery, and failure at the top. So help us God.

“The writer’s job is the job of a clown …
the clown who also talks about sorrow.”
– Kenzaburo Oe

How to Make a Ghost

Posted on December 13, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

“In life, only the small details
are worth weeping over.”
— Phaedrus

Here comes that old ghost again.
up from the backyard grass
like a whisp of sandalwood
also orange blossom drifting
from the corner of the yard.

The ghost shimmers back and forth
to get my attention.

It is the time I killed a sparrow
with my BB gun. Fifty years
and I don’t still know why
except I thought that’s what you do
with such a thing.

I didn’t know what death is,
that it’s always personal.
Only two events are in the world,
without exception.

The bird wasn’t finished with living
and very confused, frightened.
So was I. We met in the sunlight
and made a ghost.

There is no such thing as an unloaded
gun or a small cruelty. So we are still there,
still terrified on the razor of time because
this is what plagues and haunts us.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed

that creaking sound

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

A friend reminded me today of this great quote from the Watergate days:

“Well, I think we ought to let him hang there,” Ehrlichman told Dean. “Let him twist slowly, twist slowly in the wind.”
https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2013/01/28/words-of-watergate-part-2/

It amuses me because, ironically, it’s now Trump who’s leaving himself twisting in the wind. History will record his stupidity and lies. Over 20,000 [Twenty Thousand!] lies had been documented as of the 4th of July 2020. By the time he’s dragged kicking and screaming from our White House on January 20, I’m confident he’ll hit 25K.

But the truth is that Trump has never been the main character in this drama of corruption, capitulation, and mass death. He has always been the sideshow – Covfefe the Clown, who juggles, tweets, and twists – while the main act plays out in the center ring of the U.S. Congress. There are 535 voting members there, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution; a duty in which they – collectively – failed miserably.

I include the Democrats in the House, whose attempt at impeachment was effette and weird, leaving behind many valid causes of action.

Mitch McConnell has always been the real Ringmaster in this debacle. Trump is a small man, a little pucker and poot in the long and terrible history of mankind’s worst failures. But McConnell is an asshole of monumental proportions, an anus so vast you could drive a Peterbilt and 2 trailers south to north up his alimentary canal and make a u-turn below the bile duct that does his thinking, without slowing down or risking a jackknife.

So let’s be entertained, if we must watch at all, by Trump’s final twisting and turnings. His efforts to retain immunity from prosecution are entertaining. Although we can do better by simply reading a book. But if we don’t do something to flush out the coiled diverticuli of our legislature, and remove McConnell from majority power, we are well and truly trucked. Sideways.

Sunbright

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

I’ve decided to post this even though, as a poem, I think it lacks cohesion. I just feel like sharing this facet of my emotional life these days. On the night I wrote this, I felt like being experimental, whatever that means. The Wasteland was rumbling around in my brain. Also Kierkegaard. And I was thinking that we can be aware of events happening to other people, but ultimately every event in life happens to me. All experience is subjective.

Sunbright

1 Fear and Trembling

Hurry up, please. It’s time.
The governor has set a curfew now.

I had not thought Death had undone so many.
I mean Old Mr. Death, the Old Man.
The proprieties must be observed.

He stands on a hill outside town –
the insatiable wind.

He stands at the end of the street –
dogs barking.

He stands in the door of your kitchen –
the oven goes cold.

2 The Sickness

We who were living are now becalmed
in the currents of time.

We who are dying are impatient to escape
this vessel on the wind.

Why is there nowhere dark enough for rest?
The sun is vulgar to a man who would be free.

Pray for us sinners, now and until
the Old Man comes.

3 Unto Death

Pale hands at absolute zero
then whispers in the empty rooms.

May the judgment not be too heavy
upon us.

Hoarfrost – all of the flowers in your garden
are sleeping in a mist of tears.

A million dead? Oh no, far more. So count
the bodies all night long

then in the morning, sunbright gulls
on the peak of the roof.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed

How Much Love

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

I would like to give you a gift.
Here’s everything I can remember,
if I can find a vessel to hold it.
I imagine a mason jar
that once held Grandma’s jelly,
or the wooden bowl my brother
made in shop class,
almost 40 years ago.
How many thoughts can fit in such a space?

I ought to remember a lot of my life
but it seems that everything collapses
as it dries, becoming smaller
before it blows away.
So you should be able to carry this home.
Leave it in a place where there is light
in the afternoon, where birds can be heard
in the morning. Sometimes it will bring
shadows and rain, but often it will shine.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed

AT 3AM WITH THE MOON HOVERING

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

he sits up on the edge of the bed
and wonders what his soul looks like.
He’s never seen it himself, but other people do,
when he makes them laugh or causes pain.

No one will describe his soul to him,
so he imagines a green light hovering – a tiny
beacon in the air – just there in the center
of the room. It follows him everywhere,

retreating to safety when he’s angry,
looking out windows while he speaks.
He should be ashamed. So long now
since his soul was put to use.

When the moon sets and the sun appears
to lead us through another day of plague
and fear, the little light that woke him up
will flicker there and fade away.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed

The Struggle

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

It’s kind of a struggle, isn’t it? Life these days, I mean. Not still so hard everywhere on Earth, it seems, but here in the land of Star Spangled Bullshit, the matrix is still seriously warped.

Does Life ever seem unreal to you, like there’s been a glitch? Do you wonder if that feeling is based on your objective personal experience, or on what you’re being told Life is like these days? Maybe it’s some of both?

I have an idea that Life sucks in 2020. But this is because I have to wear a mask and wash my hands, and there are places I can’t go, and I’m working at home, and I’m worried about myself and my family. I’m worried there won’t be a Christmas.

Statistically speaking, your experience has probably been similar to mine: One person I know from school days got covid. She suffered (far more and longer than Big Orange did) and has recovered.

No one I know has died. Several people in my town have died but they haven’t been identified. I don’t miss them. If you were effected by such a loss, I’m sorry. It’s still disingenuous of me to claim your suffering as my own, let alone to elevate it to a national loss. If we were going to do that, we needed to start reading the names of the dead on TV a long time ago, to be caught up reading by the end of the year. 300,000 minutes – a minute for each death – is about 7 months.

I’m not downplaying the severity and tragedy of the pandemic – over 210,000 dead and counting – but most of us are suffering through 2020 vicariously, through the news and social media. We’re generalizing our personal experience based on that of the nation as a whole. Is that reality?

Incidentally, I keep hearing people talk about 2020 as a bad year; they’ll be glad when it’s over. But I’m not sure anyone has provided Covid with a puppies and kitties 2020 calendar, so the virus will be aware of our plans for a better 2021.

I sit down every day and try to write something. I write some poems. I keep a commonplace book of my reading notes and discoveries of ideas. Mostly, I keep a journal. I try to think of things that I’ll want to remember about my life in this time, and what it was like to be me. Mostly, I think I fail, because I’m not writing what it’s really like to be me. I’m writing what it’s like to be me under the influence – not of alcohol or drugs, but of other people. We are all swimming in a fishbowl of other peoples’ influence, and it would be absurd to suggest that’s not what we’re made of.

It reminds me of that old joke about the fish. Two young fish are swimming in a river when an old fish passes and says, “How’s the water, boys?” They turn to him and ask, “What’s water?”

Well, the water we’re swimming in, mes amis, is information.[i] I watched a John Green YouTube today in which he said:

“Our information feeds shape us. What you do with your attention is, in the end, what you do with your life. So I gotta be careful what I pay attention to, because the stuff that’s the loudest and the most outrageous, is, for me at least, also often the stuff of nightmares.”

We know this is true, though sometimes it seems like people believe they have a second life, apart from what they’re experiencing in a given moment. There’s Now and then there’s Real Life. I’ll pay attention to this newsthink program for a while, then I’ll get back to my real life.

That doesn’t work. We are thought, consciousness, awareness, and experience, at this moment. Nothing else exists independently. Our thoughts make our lives. As Marcus Aurelius said, the happiness of our lives depends upon the quality of our thoughts.

Given that’s the truth of consciousness, it boggles my mind that people are so careless with what influences they allow. For example, millions of people watched the debates – intentionally – knowing from experience what those things are like. It’s just bad theatre.

I was in a place where I wasn’t watching but I couldn’t avoid hearing the blabbering of the goats. What a horrendous waste of minds and hearts is politics; what a vast mis-firing of countless neurons. And we’ve been brainwashed into this concept civic duty requires us to attend to its effluvial process, not as a means of learning but as acolytes from whom a sacrifice of precious and finite Time is demanded by The Lord of the Flies. So we snap on the telly and squat ourselves down to watch.

For an hour and a half or more, we forget that we’re going to die and we’re not getting that time back. And what’s worse, what we watched and heard becomes a part of our subconsciousness for the rest of our lives.

What it’s like to be me right now – the way it is – is to be a tiny, insignificant thread in the Charlotte’s Web of American Life; the illusion that American life is distinct from other life; and the false dichotomy that one guy or another is really Some Pig. Which isn’t to say we don’t have to make an important distinction – and cast a vote – against the ~~covid~~ rabid pig that eats human flesh and for the pig that doesn’t.

If you asked the average person to draw a ven diagram of American society, they would draw two distinct and separate circles: Us and Them. That’s pure bullshit cognitive dissonance; there are thousands, if not millions, of circles. You’re visiting my circle right now; at least a fleck of it that I can manage to type up from a moment’s fleeting awareness.

Circumstances always and uniquely alter the truth of things. The truth is that day to day, each of us is absolute winging it through this shit. We’ve been hit by a rogue wave in the endlessly repeating patterns of human life and history. And when that happens, the ship’s captain doesn’t retire to his cabin to read his books on seamanship. Sombody gotta grab the wheel.

We Americans have the added complication that the ship’s captain isn’t on the bridge. He went straight to the bowels of the vessel when we left port nearly 4 years ago. He’s been down there ever since, out of his fucking mind, issuing orders that will likely take us all down hard by the bow.

I didn’t sit down here to write a post about Hair Furor. He wasn’t on my mind, except that really he always is. Having no legitimate, certainly no well-intentioned, leadership, is making life harder and more complicated for every one of us, whether in subtle or dramatic ways. And when I say that Trump is insane, I’m not being facetious or anything but completely literal. I’m saying his behavior is indicative of raging mental illnesses, as far out of control as any wildfire my home state of California has experienced this year. He’s truly nuts.

I can’t think of a good way to end this post. It has rambled a bit. And I really need to get away from this screen. Daylight is burning! I’m not used to typing this long anymore. I’ll leave you with Good Night and Good Luck, and this:

The chief task in life is simply this: To identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own. – Epictetus, discourses , 2.5.4.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. – Proverbs, 4:23

[i] Yeah, I don’t really speak French. I’ve been binging Poirot; it’s great. Sorry, not sorry. LOL.

Remembering it Now

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Kyle Kimberlin

Alright, gentle readers. Gettin’ down to it. Gettin’ serious. “Because here we were dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor Beat life itself, in the godawful streets of Man.”
– Kerouac

____________________________________

Remembering it Now

My bicycle is gone, the one with the banana
seat, hand brakes and handlebars
like rams’ horns, wrapped with yellow glitter tape.
It was 5 speed, which was boss in 1972.
Chased by a German Shepherd, I rode it
into a ditch. My mother rescued me.

Papa’s typewriter cannot be found,
a heavy old Royal with black
and red ribbon. No electricity required.
He let me play with it but he used it
to write letters about dogs — German Shepherds.
And dogs arrived and they were good
— his dogs didn’t chase children off the road.

Phone books are gone. Are they even
printed anymore? No need – all of the names
are lost to time and all of the time is lost
to suffering and fear. No one is even
naming the dead. I didn’t know Death
could take so many without bombs
or guns or a very good reason. Casus
belli. We’re going to need a bigger book.

Months and days and hours are gone,
disappeared in the tule fog of quarantine
and unknowing, and weeks of fear
and counting of the unremembered Dead.
The soul waits in a closet the back of the house,
with the sweaters we were wearing
when the world blew down.

All of the Kingdoms of Hope are gone,
all of the plans we had, the bright joyful
memories of time to come.
Who can remember Christmas in a plague?
How we met back in 2020, and we hugged,
hands around the table. In the kitchen,
side by side. We hoped!
We remembered a future more bright
than it ever could have been.

So any time you want to weep for all
that is gone, brothers and sisters, I’ll join you.
From hopefully safely now and here.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
Creative Commons Licensed