“don’t bring that negativity here”

November 20, 2019 ~ Nuciferas

I am absolutely enthralled in the art of looking at things from all angles, especially the pessimistic one. I love what the positivity movement is all about but as someone who has been to the bottom, over and over again, it just does not jive with my spirit to be taken by that entirely. My writing explores the darkness, the shadows, because in them there are serious lessons to be learned. Even as it hurts to be bruised watching while others seem to have a better time living, this darkness hides a door that the light obscures. The depths of the soul are not created and shaped by the lightness of being, but of moving through the world with the vigor righteousness of valleys. A river came through here, shaped this landscape, and created new flora and fauna.

Edgar Allan Poe is someone who I could count as my first love, in everything, as strange as that sounds. I spent the majority of the beginnings of my poetry journey trying to master the rhythm and movements in the stanzas of lines to form a poem like that of Mr. Poe. After being introduced to The Raven and then diving through Poe’s oeuvre, I found myself alive and eager to refine the fetus like beginnings of my writing. I amassed a collection of the poems, each looking at everything with a very critical eye, not wanting to sugar coat anything.

This collection I named Humanism in Pessimism. There’s something very human in pointing out what’s wrong, or what could go wrong. It’s a natural re-calibration of the mind that helps determine what reality is really like and hopefully to reshape it to how it should be.

Here’s one: from, “The Glass Half Empty”

The Needle in the Gun

Flagrant speeches harbor stories
written in between lines that hurry
past the carrion withering in your voice
the soul is surprised at every choice

Senselessly feeding quagmires on your shores
impossible within the realms of your shorts
but the vowels are distorted and cut to pieces
where is the translator in all your demons?

Smooth apparatus containing the rage against the machine
bluntly walking but staggering away from me
disappointed consonants divorced from those ‘sometimes’
where is the demon of your good times?

Dismantling objects debasing them just so
getting off and turned on by baseless prose
charging into the flames of the sun
hoping to do away with the needle in the gun

“Is not every word an impulse on the air?”

November 7, 2019 ~ Nuciferas

Agathos (trans. good) Oinos (trans. wine)

Good wine. The elixir of the gods. An offering to the ethers from Edgar Allan Poe.

“OINOS: Pardon, Agathos, the weakness of a spirit new-fledged with immortality!” We have Oinos now conscious of their spirit in death as they approach Agathos, an angel, a guide now helping Oinos in the beginning of this new journey of the spirit beyond the mortal realm.

The conversation touches upon the idea that now in death, everything should be known, all the mysteries eluding the spirit in mortal form now fully fledged, opened, and known. But it is not so because even God doesn’t know all.

OINOS: But does not The Most High know all?
AGATHOS: That (since he is The Most Happy) must be still the one thing unknown even to Him.
OINOS: But, since we grow hourly in knowledge, must not at last all things be known?

This is something that plagues people, shouldn’t we know all once we leave the mortal form behind, isn’t it the point? The mysteries now revealed?

“The Power of Words” is a beautiful force upon the conscious mind who is in constant titillation of wanting to know all. The soul, after all is not made to have the knowledge and that’s it, to swallow the facts and close satisfied like a mouth, “the sole purpose is to afford infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the thirst to know, which is forever unquenchable within it- since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul’s self.”

The continual creation from the catalyst of God’s first creation is a ripple effect that can be traced down to the atom. Even the soul’s material is dependent on this motion, to move constantly in the direction of knowing, and to not want to know is akin to the soul’s death. The stagnant mortal body now perishes, the vehicle of immortality now snuffed. The mortal will never taste the immortality gifted to them.

OINOS: Then all motion, of whatever nature, creates?
AGATHOS: It must: but a true philosophy has long taught that the source of all motion is thought- and the source of all thought is-
OINOS: God

What is the point? A constant search for knowledge? That, for some is simply not entertaining and certaintly not something that seems to be of interest insofar it gets them to an end.

It’s all about the process: the struggle to one problem and its solution to another theory and its summation of an inkling of a truth. We don’t live to die, we live to live and to enjoy that living.

Oinos is said to be “one” but its Greek translation is “wine”. I believe Poe intended it to be wine. Agathos’ Greek translation is “good”.

Here’s some good wine, is how I see it. Here’s a conversation laden with potential for you, here’s an offering to the dark shadows in your mind, let me pour it out here. And since “The Power of Words” is meant to signify how we speak things into existence, just as Agathos helped God speak the Earth into existence, everything laid before is the friction of the match before the spark blooms into fire, in other words, this isn’t meant as prose but an explanation of the power that the mortal possesses as one speaks their life into existence, how those words then form the foundations of their life and then how the fullness of the expression can make the wholeness of a life lived. The point dear mortal is to live, to ask, to seek, and then to transcend with this knowledge into the next one.

Philosophy is but a poetical explanation of the self set in motion by the thoughts that if it were traced back can be pinpointed to God, the original creator. We continue not to merely continue, the blooms of everything is an expression looking for the words. We find them, we speak them, and the power behind them can literally make a world.

“The Power of Words” (originally published in the Democratic Review, June 1845) in Tales, Sketches and Selected Criticism by Edgar Allan Poe.

a letter for maple

November 4, 2019 ~ Nuciferas

cold isn’t the right word yet. brisk? cool? it’s something blue though, something that blends into the red and smears it with purple. there’s also the blue breeze blowing against your skin and it makes you shiver. i see you shake off a bit of your gold. copper? rust? something dying i suppose and being taken by the blue wind that makes the skin turn purple. it hurts now, a fresh paper cut. the warmness was too much but it was comforting in the grayness of the shadows huh? and there one could daydream comfortably waiting for a cool drink. i suppose you’re tired anyway and can’t wait for sleep. it has been mistaken for death for so long. what will you dream about? the sun won’t leave you, even as everything cools down to blueberry evenings, there the sun will be winking between the grey clouds. grey never leaves. maybe the green. the colors always stay maple, that i’m sure of. no matter how much we turn away, there they’ll be pulsing according to their moods. my mood, maple? oh honey, my moods are now dancing with the sky. the moon extends her skirts every now and then getting caught in my curls. the stars they pounce at every turn of the rhythm to catch a glimpse of my scanning eyes. maple dear, do not fret, sleep. i’ll take repose now and then but i won’t forget you. when you rise from your dreams i’ll be better for you, i promise.