New Entry, Or Rumi Met John in Elephant Architecture

Psych class is going well. It looks like I’ll be getting an A. My advisor is pushing for me to go ahead and apply for The Nursing Program earlier than projected. One of my lead Nurse Supervisors at work sort of welcomed me aboard by asking me if I think I’ll finish soon. That felt really good. It’s sort of like being there without yet being there. I’m already familiar with the Patients (or Clients they call them these days, but I prefer Patients) and paperwork I’ll be dealing with. That’s the upshot of being a Paperwork Bitch-Boy sometimes: I’m already familiar with that part of the job.

I watched a little Facebook short video of some guy interviewing a recognizable physician saying if he could relive his life he wouldn’t have worked so hard and much and that looking back he shouldn’t have been so concerned in proving the value of his existence and that he should have just appreciate the moments more, spent time with family and so on. It was a little sad and almost demotivating to me in a sense.

Dr. Gabe Mat’e

I’ve been thinking about it all morning and while I slept today. Do I work too much? I do, but I’ve had to sort of remind myself that I have played a lot and I do take time to appreciate things. I take time to garden. I’m growing my own bonsai trees from seeds. I call my mother frequently, almost like she is one of my best friends. She is set to visit next weekend and we plan to hike a cool nature path at a local city park called Hurricane Creek. I say “city” but it is still a pretty remote “city”. The views are ridiculously pristine. I don’t keep in touch with most of my siblings but we are just not the same people and I have just read in my Psych textbook that that is normal. We have grown into different types of adults and we have redefined our relationships. (I attempted to keep in touch for a while sending gifts and cards in a dignified manner, but it was not reciprocated and that didn’t break my heart either).

I do plan on being balls-deep in school work for the remainder of the year, alas. Anatomy & Physiology I this summer and then Microbiology and Anatomy II this Fall, - And that is bittersweet. I will push aside my playtime this year but with hopes that I will be able to play more later on down the road. I have a two week vacation coming up soon this May and I hope to detox from stimulants, hit the yoga studio twice a day and refuel with superfood smoothies. After that, I hope to do my summer ritual in which I will leap from a tall bluff into a riverbend at Limestone. I will swim laps up and down the current and get my first sun tan this year by laying out on the river beach there.

During my last Entry I was feeling angsty. The poet in me emerged after two bottles of hot sake: visions of Berryman, Rumi and Silvia Plath played through my mind as the hot steaming sake hugged my internal organs. It was a prose-poem journal entry John Berryman’s Dream Songs haunt my conscious mind. The Poet, The Speaker, an imaginary friend named Henry and a nameless other who refers to the speaker as Mr. Bones. It is a vast understatement that many have not been taught to read modern poetry in the correct manner. I came up against this in my Creative Writing class where the reader envisions one person speaking. However, Modern Poetry (or that sweet spot between Modernity and pst-Modern called American Contemporary Poetry) can be a collective of many voices in one poem: I am Large and I contain millions as Walt Whitman once sang in Leaves of Grass. Imagine a stream-of-consciousness in the form of a physical creek containing the voices across the land. The Poet’s function is to emerge his mind into that stream, listen to all the voices speaking and capture the surreal, metaphysical content he experiences onto a page. The Poet may never speak in the poem himself. He may only be transcribing the world he hears spoken by the voices already present.

At this point in my writing and poetry life, I have turned to Journaling though I had Journaled many years apart from my poetry. I call what I do now: Prose-Poetic Journalling. This is partially due to a widening audience of folks who may have not had access to Upper-Level English Courses. In Defense of Poetry, great Literature versus television, Podcasts and now short videos of TikTok and Facebook, there is a multiverse of an ecosystem beneath the lines of written, made things or Poiesis my beloved late English and Philosophy Prof. relayed. The original word for poem in Greek: Poiesis or “made thing”. Let that sink in… Dr. W_, his wife weeps at her computer in the Biology Department working late as I type these lines; a portal opens into a network of connectedness and consciousness. And there is a window into a world of sublime knowledge known through the poets’ verses. We are never alone when we find the portal into eternity. W.S. Merwin is still there shining over his poetic fields of pristine naturalism. Like sunshine marching over the summit, the trees’ neon dipped leaves of green shine and a cool breeze stirs the branches like the cnidarians of a coral reef swirling and waving and wanting, beguiling and dwarfing; the mountain is hard like tranquil fields of Gin and leaving me consideringly away. Wag.

Last updated April 08, 2024