BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

…

Crystal Pite

From what I’ve seen of her work online, I think I would really love the full works of Kidd Pivot. I recently saw this trailer for Pite’s piece, The Tempest Replica. Amazing dancers and looks like wonderful theater and movement.

There’s nothing to hold

in this dark country. Cold and old.

I sold

my soul to the fast-food devil and

made it down the street to McDonald’s

in time for breakfast.

40 cents for ketchup;

I eat my hashbrowns naked in the sleeve,

alone. All the faces greasy in their sleeves.

Everyone wants the answers to their questions:

“Ce que je voudrais des frites avec ça?”

(Not if I have to pay for ketchup, sac-de-douche!)

Are we all here all self-destructive?

Maybe the fast food devil is the other one, too.

___________

My knuckles hurt from:

– A glass wall of a bank

– Ketchup boxes

– Mailboxes and bus poles

The newer pain should help dull the old?

Unless the same bloody spot is smashed,

ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!

     One more bow,

     Makes eight,

     Turn the 8,

     Makes infinity,

     Spin the infinity,

     Turns into a lizard,

     Eating its tail.

À plus tard, Alligator!

À plus tard, A..lli…

___________

If you punch Catsup it looks like blood.

If you punch it hard enough it is.

Dean Young is a poet I often forget to mention when listing my favorite poets and for whom I later kick myself for forgetting. I love his stuff. His thoughts seem free associated, but it they keep revolving an idea like a fist that keeps materializing all around you getting closer and closer until it smacks you in the jaw. I can’t find it online, but the first poem I read by him is “Rabbit, I love you.” Here is an excerpt:

Also,

Luciferin

I miss the Dodge Medivan.

Well, I should say it’s not really a Medivan, but it flowed better than saying “Dodge Wheelchair Accessible Conversion Van with Lift.”  I should also say that I miss vehicles in general, or I will. The last few days have  been wrought with errand running and all of it on foot. I actually do enjoy walking and biking a lot; and I’m so happy for the transit system here and how central everything is, but, man, could I use me some van loving to take off the edge a bit.

My good friend Megan McClellan and her husband, Brian, let me use their van for a few weeks before the move over here which turned out to be invaluable in the move out of our condo. I rode so high off the ground that when I drove our regular car it felt like riding a Big Wheel. It had some power to it, too.

All this to say, I know I will miss the luxury of a vehicle. Mostly to get out of the city. When I lived in NYC for a  season I really ached to get out, but I was stuck with no car and no money for a train. And even if I did have money for a train it wouldn’t have let me off on the back roads deep in a forest to get lost in. I could have always jumped, I guess.

Besides the horrible gas mileage(13mpg!!!) a vehicle like that Dodge calls to me. I like to get up and go so if I don’t have to put up a tent, great! In fact, on my road trips I always sleep in my car even if it takes a few nights to get used to it. A quick brush of the teeth and water on the face and back on the weather-beaten roads.

 Road  trips seem like a distinctly American thing. Our relatively cheap oil and cars. Even though it will be best for our environment that road trips, as we know them, will probably be a thing of the past soon, it is sad. Maybe if a decent solar powered car with advanced gyroscopic technology came along, but I can’t imagine an electric car making it through the Canadian Rockies. Maybe pilgrimages will become a thing again.

But here I am, without a car. No trunk. No sunroof. No backseat. No insurance, either, which is flipping awesome. I guess I can always rent a car… But that takes planning and sometimes I just need to go. This his does make me think of Hemingway’s short story Big, Two-Hearted River(parts 1 & 2). If I recall correctly the war-beaten Nick gets off a train, walks though a burneddown town and along the river where he finds a pine needle bed. That was set in the U.S., but I bet I could find something like that over here. Gotta look for where the tracks cross the green on the map!

Somehow I wish I could have pushed pause in Minneapolis when I left, that things would stay the way they are and I could fit right back in. But she moves, the world.

I don’t really want Minneapolis to wait. Please, God, there is much to be improved and so much room for new growth! If I were so satisfied with Minneapolis I wouldn’t have left. Black Label Movement fed my artistic needs and is why I stayed as long as I did (and I will to return to it), but I am hungry for more right now.

There is so much to discover! I saw a guy today lower two whole sides of a cow on meat hooks on some mechanical lift thing today. He was all in white and when the meat was as low as the lift would take them he pulled over his white hood, shouldered the meat like fallen comrade and brought it into the shop. I’ve never see that nor thought people still did that in the developed world. But seeing him cover his head like a little druid and haul in that carcass totally made my morning.

I checked in with the Ultima Vez office and even though we don’t start rehearsals until next week a thrill shot through me being in the place. It feels alive and a little scary. Like when I first started college and there were what felt like endless opportunities before me. I am anxious to get started and absorb it all and give back to it, too.

I am not a creature of habit, but one of frontier. If there are boundaries I want to see what’s on the other side. But I do want a fire and a camp to come back to, maybe even a hearth. When I was in high school I was always the last to go to bed and the first to get up(hell, I still am… the last to go to bed, that is). There was a pleasant loneliness to being the only one conscious. But I doubt I would have enjoyed it as much if I really was alone. I fantasized about being one of the last humans alive as I’d walk down the middle of empty Green Bay streets as night, except I did take comfort that my mom was, ultimately, available if I really did need her. Or my brother was in his bed in case I was feeling impish and wanted to freak him out by breathing heavily outside his window on the roof.

It is a little hard to imagine it feeling like home here. It has only been three days, though. I look forward to the time when I walk down the streets and don’t imagine I’m an undercover agent in a foreign country, but that I’m an undercover agent trying not to let his guard down in his own hood.

It has been one day and, of course, I am still in awe of where I am, but I certainly do miss Minnesota. I have become familiar with the Twin Cities like no other place in my life, thoroughly explored the St. Croix River and several of Minnesotan state parks and forests, spent five weeks straight in Duluth but herein lies the real tragedy… I was SO close yet I have never made it up to the boundary waters!!!  People who know me think it’s absolutely crazy I’ve lived in Minnesota for ten years and haven’t ventured into that wilderness. I know! Lame.

I’ve had several friends ask me along (they had all the gear and canoes I don’t have), but I always had something I couldn’t get out of. And it sucks. Because now I’ve left without seeing it with my own eyes. I see videos like this and I kick myself:

Boundary Waters Part 2

That said, next time I’m in MN for an extended period I will get an expedition together, or join one, and explore those International waters. But now that I think of it, maybe there was something in my subconscious that has prevented me from going knowing that if I did I wouldn’t come back. Maybe keep heading north… you know, in case of a zombie attack? And then I’d not be much help, at least not in the initial break out, and I have lots of people I care about in Minnesota that I’d want to help defend against the bloody hordes. So, yes, that must be why I haven’t found my way up there yet. Still, it would probably be good to do a little reconnaissance before the apocalypse so as to find a safe route away from big cities and into Canada. Preparedness is key.

First morning in Brussels, my new home. It feels weird and not at the same time. Helps that I have been here a few times before and even had a drink last April at the bar down the street from the place I am living at for the next three months or so.

A new start. I have some things on the agenda this coming week: get phones, work out(Ultima Vez has gotten our cast gym memberships to get our asses in shape), check in with the Belgian emassy, relearn choreography I learned last time I was here before I start on the 19th, eat some good cheese and good chocolate… But for the first time, outside of when I’ve been on tour, I have space in my schedule. I do want to keep it like that as long as possible, because I know full well life will gobble it up. But I think it will be nice to sit and read and not feel like I’ll pay for it later.

I also have time again to write. Something I have not done for ages, it seems, but has always been therapeutic. I can already tell I’m going to need some oiling, but I have poems and short stories in me that need releasing! Novels even!!!  Maybe. Ha!

Anyways, good morning, Europe. Let’s be friends!

………………………………

Yesterday is gone and took away its tale.
Today we must live a fresh story again! – Rumi

Just watched this love letter of a video, The Voyagers. It reopened a feeling I haven’t had for a long time while it also introduced me to something new that certainly benefitted by being attached to that reopened feeling, but is, in its own right, a very worthy subject. Now then…

The feeling that came back definitely was lit by the nostalgia and scope of the whole film, but it really hit me at 8:56 – 9:20. This image of a retreating earth from space was a vision I had many times growing up. In fact, in high school I covered, and I mean really COVERED, my ceiling with with glow-in-the-dark stickers to get as close to a night sky as kid with equal parts OCD and ADHD can get. I put up a few constellations and clusters up, but I filled my entire ceiling with probably around 1000 glowing stickers of varying sizes. I had a black light in place of my ceiling light(often consummating my astro-womb with The Cranberries, Ray Bradbury, bean bag, water color paints, and sandlewood incense) that charged the glow stickers to the max! I had also bought, with me meager allowance, two fairly large glow-in-the-dark stickers of the moon and earth. The moon I stuck near my door, the earth I put right above my pillow.

I stared at this image every night for a few years(I changed my room around a lot, but I’d usually replace the earth back above my headboard). I’d open my window in the winter and imagine floating in cold space. I’d squint a little on top my dark blue comforter and drift away. These were some of my best memories of high school; it helped me keep things in perspective. And I loved being alone, and not just because I enjoyed the pain of being lonely, like one might enjoy jumping into a hole in the ice knowing they’ll come out before they die. It felt timeless and I needed it. I still do.

A little about that love affair with loneliness. It was always rooted in possibility. Wonderful things I’d experience that really made me feel lonely also made me dream of the kindred spirit with whom I could someday share those things: at the top branches of a juvenile Red Pine listening to the wind blow…  driving through Clearwater National Forest on Hwy 12 in Idaho… sitting at a cafe along Kalakaua Ave at Waikiki reading…  crying to Michael Jackson’s “Will You Be There”(before Free Willy ruined it) in my underwear and white v-neck t-shirt. Yeah… magical.

Anyway, the image I held in my head of the earth from space held this same sad hopefulness. From middle school through… now, I guess, I have been drawn to science fiction and a theme that recurs in most books and movies is adventure paired with isolation. Like many people I know, it’s left quite an imprint on my personality. That’s probably why I’ve always loved driving in the middle of the night and imagining it was post-apocalypse. But this idea of leaving earth?  Just like the cold air from my window, felt clean. I loved the idea of starting new without so many people. It would be sad to leave my beautiful world, but oh the places I’d go! I am an explorer, a scout at heart.

That said, onto the “something new!” The film introduced to me the band The Magnetic Fields. The voice in the closing credits is that of Stephin Merritt, songwriter and singer for the band. They have been around since the late 80’s but this is the first I’ve taken notice of them. I found the closing credits song, “Book of Love,” on a huge three disk volume, 69 Love Songs. I love it. I’m listening as I write…

And nothing matters when we’re dancing 
In tat or tatters you’re entrancing 
Be we in Paris or in Lansing 
nothing matters when we’re dancing

So great! Despite many of the songs are of unrequited love it still sends me out of orbit and into the heart of my old mate, the Milky Way. Ope, off I go!!! Can’t hold on any longer.  Join  me  if   you’re   feeling   a       bit     world  –  weary          .              There’s              space                    for      you,                      too…

Dance with me my old friend 
once before we go 
Let’s pretend this song won’t end 
and we never have to go home 
and we’ll dance among the chandeliers

2010 McKnight Fellow! It is a good year. Praise God!