Sacrifice to the Knight

"I will not be controlled! I am
the master of my fate.
Destiny dances to MY piper's tune!"

A hand comes down and moves me
one square forward.

85/03/06

Another poem from Flowers and Vice

Talent

Sifting dust with my soul
proffered forth in cupped hands
Threads of blood and thick gray dust
chips of bone and sweat
and rust

Sodden mud; the tears of anger
sterile
fall through clutching hands

Bitter salt in soul`s revealing
dryness freed and yet undone
Turn away in foul loathing.

Thin and cold and dead and done.

1985

____________

Well that was a cheery year.

Alleluia

If I recall

Your title was, and still is
"The Bright and Morning Star"

And if

the carol is correct
"...the Morning Stars together
proclaimed the holy birth."

Then

With what irony, did you sing?
(Bass, at the back, on the left
I'm sure)

Announcing HIS birth.
In whose Name -- enough atrocities
will be and are perpetuated,

To sate even you?

And

HIS birth - according to some,
will end all the struggle,
So you can stop.

Even Lucifer

I should think (perhaps even especially)
would get weary of darkness.

What thoughts,
Passed through the glowing mind
of Dark -- Light bearer -- as you sang?

Morning Star

Together.

Dec. 2003

New Blog

One of my books, that I initially debuted in Eclipse Court, now has a blog all its own.

It is Kyrus at KyrusTalain.blogspot.com. I will be updating the site with artwork and various gadgets along the way.



























































































































































I've moved












yrustalain.blogspot.com is where it is.

Totally bummed by a good review

This is so weird. I get a fantastic review and I'm totally devastated by one line in it.

It basically puts Eclipse Court in the same orchestra as Philosopher in Arms and implies that it is secondary... it is the 'harmony' to PA's 'melody'. Secondary theme!

Jesus. It is my own work and it's own 'melody'. It is NOT a lesser reflection or echo to anything else. I'm sure it was meant as descriptive rather than comparative, but it still hurts.

Off to lick my wounds and post the next bit of my work.

Learning

Today a friend came over and taught Tristan and I to fire rifles. We tried the .22, the 12 gauge, and the 30.06. The 30.06 has about the same kickback as the shotgun but it feels like it has so much more authority. It feels very different.

Wow. Interesting and a first step toward our FAC's.

Considering Quitting

I woke up today and seriously considered quitting writing for a while. What has it ever gotten be but heartache?

It's either the creative heartache or monetary and to be honest I'm much better at flaying and filleting myself creatively.

I have too much of my self-esteem tied up with the words I produce and it seems I've chosen a life both destined and doomed to be obscure. I've been saying that to be a writer one has to be persistent and consistent.

Right now, all I am is tired.

Wondering what the hell I'm doing

I'm sitting here feeling lower than a snakes navel. I have people telling me they like what I'm doing but I cannot convince everyone to throw me so much as a dollar on paypal. One fan in Denmark did, a while ago.

Now I'm wondering if it's right to ask at all for monetary support.

I cannot keep doing this. 300 dollars since March does not a living make.

I'm going to have to stop it seems, or slow down and this is the thing I really want to do.

One of my doofus dogs

This is Hoover. He just turned three and is a total klutz about stepping on people's feet. He's still enough of a pup that he doesn't know where his own feet are.

Of course Rio still doesn't and he's nine.

I'll profile the sons of bitches here and the bitch herself.

Then I'll show you the cat I work for and eventually the new kitten.

I have too many animals but if I didn't I'd probably just aquire more. I acrue animals and we like each other. I feel incomplete without a dog or a cat. I've had birds and fish... oh... the fish... yeah I have to show you them too.

I will be getting chickens. I'd like peacocks too. See? I'm nuts this way. Sigh. You'll eventually see all of them.

When I was the freaky kid the dog was my best buddy. He was my job, my playmate. He climbed trees with me and went on every piece of the playground equipment. He spent summer afternoons in a tree, on my lap, while I read. Poor dog, he bore the brunt of my need to control something in my life and forgave me for it all.

Animals never used me, not like people. Animals had no agenda and they valued me and loved me both.

No longer driving a Molotov Cocktail

The gas leak in my car has been fixed. I still have the exhaust to fix but at least noise isn't quite so dangerous.

Have a look at the red-neck hoist...

Random Poetry

A Modern Fate

Damn,
says Clotho.
Another run in my nylons!
Antropos, lend me
your scissors.

The Freakin' Dog Made it HOME!!!

On Tuesday, Rio and Hoover got out of my car when I gave a friend in need a ride into town to get groceries and back to the hunt camp where they were staying. They disappeared.

Hoover made it back to my house, thirty klicks away, that night. Rio wasn't with him.

I was just about to write him off when who should come home?

Rio. Gods if only dogs could talk. His tag is missing. He's soaking wet and he vacuumed up a bowl of dog food in nothing flat!

Jeez I was already starting to mourn him because it was so out of character for him.

My dogs are all fixed so who knows what happened? Maybe someone took him in... just let him out and he took off on them?

I'll never know.

But as little as I need three big dogs, my family is complete again and my boys will be happy.

A good homecoming and a small incredible journey!

Ildyls

Summer has finally arrived. I just chased the dogs back from a romp into the bush, pretending to chase something, and flung myself in the pool.

Who cares if it is an above ground pool and not the design of my dreams? I have a computer that can practically dance a jig and more music at my command than the Sun King.

I can eat from plates all over the world and be entertained by hundreds if I flip on the freakin' TV.

The funny thing is that I still feel like I've failed in life! Wow. And no one has ever heard that before.

After I die, no one is going to care if this year I had trouble.

Even next year. No one is going to care.

So why am I letting this bother me? Because I feel I must. I shouldn't just enjoy what I have. Because... because... um... no reason [insert sheepish grin here] Just as some religions would teach... "If you aren't sweatin' or bleedin', what good are you?"

I need neither sweat nor bleed to deserve life and a good one.

Wow.

Where did this one come from?

It won't matter. Ultimately it won't matter one whit. And in that thought is freedom.

Excuse me while I go back into the pool to think about this one for a while! Cheers!

This is the high flight. This is the long way up. If you thought I was emotional about the low and slow... this blows that one out of the water. I'm dreaming of flying. It's the closest thing to dreams of flight as I've ever had.

Oh gods. I'm sooooo hooked!

When first you have tasted flight...

Tris's third flight
Karen in the air
Tris before his launch.

On Thursday I and I presume the rest of the family who particpated --Tristan, my biological son, and Karen, my ex, experienced a transformative experience.

We went hang-gliding. And now I understand da Vinci's quote about longing to return. Once I got off the ground, that magical instant when a flailing, running toe swipes at the earth and misses... when the heavy thing you have on your shoulders all of a sudden becomes part of you and effortlessly lifts you into the air... It is addictive and I want my next fix.

There is... in fact... another lesser transformation. When the tow rope goes slack and it's all you. Or rather you and the glider but it feels like all you.
My third flight. Video by Karen Wehrstein

I have felt lighter on my feet ever since.

Homesick for the Sky

The wings my soul has dreamed of, enmeshed in clay, now manifest in lofting silence.
words drift away, thistledown in the wind.
There is only the wind.
a bubble of laughter in my chest.
The name of joy is flight and oh, thank the gods I have met her
been introduced.

Fleeting moments in the presence of the sky
cradled in the wind's hand, let me kiss it again
pull me up out away from where my feet press too hard
upon the earth.

too happy for tears then
tears now... homesick for the sky.

My 500 lb Cast Iron Tchochke

I have a heart's desire sitting on my screen porch right now. When I was a little girl I always thought that one of the coolest things in the world to have would be a wood fired cookstove.

And now I have one... a beautiful "Happy Thought" six burner. It has a warming oven above and is a classic cream and green.

The problem is... it isn't an air-tight. If I tried to heat my cabin with it I could pour wood into it by the truckload and either be roasting or freezing as it roared through the hardwood. It's also too big for the tiny twenty by twenty one foot log portion of my house. It's dangerous. I'd have to contrive to put it in the middle of the room to fire that sucker up without my insurance company, and local fire departments having conniption fits.

It weighs five hundred pounds [roughly] and needs to have a couple of pieces of cast iron bolted back on. You can't weld cast iron... at least not these chunks.

At the moment it deserves better than to be a sideboard and potting bench. I should sell it. I should sell it... But. Its my Happy Thought. Sometimes I think I keep it for the name alone.

But.

I tell myself that if I put a summer kitchen on the back of this place I could use it there. But.

But it makes no sense for me to keep it. I like it. I've had it. I should let it go. But it makes me smile when I look at it. But.

So my thoughts go round and round. Until I figure it out I have a five hundred pound tchochke sitting on my front porch.

The Words I Write are the Walls

The words I write are the Walls. They are also inscribed on the walls of my inner life, my inner self. When I dream, the words with which I have decorated my inner edges, held back the fearful void, peel off and float around my sleeping eye re-awakening the thoughts that birthed them to begin with. We dream our edges. As a species we are namers, and sorters, creatures who must create edges. We divide this from that and do so in finer and finer words, each one more and more delicate like the filigree lace on the edge of the Mandelbrod lake. We define infinity with words that are infinitely divisible, a rubber ruler with which we measure Reality.

There was a time I remember before words. It is hard to describe because description is infinitely recursive. The existence of meaning drew the world into an edged focus and finished my dreamtime. I had the understanding that the sounds I heard from my father’s mouth meant something.

This was a wonderful, dreadful, awful shock, and when I say awful I do mean full of awe. The soft, Vaseline world snapped into hard edges. I could name the edges. This, not this. Pronouns, verbs, adverbs. I had not a word for them but I had the beasts themselves. The words were bright and bitter and acid and sweet. They were agile as spiders or silverfish which disappeared into the cracks and whorls of my brain only to reappear in the most unexpected of places.

Every language has its thirty-wonderful flavors, the fullness and roundness of the world re-expressed every time a mouth is opened. A country cannot truly be understood or tasted unless one has savored the language on all edges of the tongue. Even then, the secondary speaker can only sample the diffuseness of the way the world is seen by this culture, like a curry powder left in the sun; a pale shadow of itself.

And still there is the underlying pattern of language that coils in every spiral in every cell in our bodies, a recognition of spoken communication that is limited to millions of words. Words rise out of our flesh and create what we see and how we see it. In this sense we are the magician, wielding words as our wands. This and this and this is the shape of the world. In a world where we are told there is no magic it is the big lie. It is our magic, our power, our fiery dragon on whose back we ride and in turn are ridden. As we shape the world we are shaped.

John recognized the Face of God. It is the Word.

Trying to keep up with the words

I have too many things to write and not enough time, but I'm getting there.

I hope I start getting some readers for Eclipse Court. I think its a good book myself but then I'm biased.

Karen made an astonishing cover for me and I now have a copy on my desk to inspire me.

It will also be easier once I stop being cold all the time because my fire's gone out. Cheers to spring.

Blessed Be!

The snow is finally GOING

I've done four posts in Eclipse Court and my lovely new banner ad is from Karen.

I haven't had the fire lit for two days and I haven't been cold! Woo Hoo! Now I have to go and work on 'Numbers' for a while...

No shit I have to market myself!

I'm struggling to finish the next bricks and mortar book in a timely fashion and I'm going to have to do a full week of nothing but to get ahead.

My co-author is justifiably ticked at me.

My oldest son just played in the steel band at his school and he's doing really well on his volcano project... I have just been co-opted into the obligatory volcano project though I think we will do coke and mentos instead of baking soda and vinegar.

I may not freeze to death this winter. The chinking in my log-home has been pulled loose by the frost heave and I had this howling gap over my bed three feet long... the house temperature went to 6 degrees c.

I need to work harder somehow. I'm not sure how I can squeeze more out of myself but I will.

Monday I start posting the online book regularly.

Onward and upward.