Life could just as well be fiction. Perhaps it is. It is. But it is a play we must play out.

               

                Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson never met, although they could have, and each in their own “queer” ways having changed poetry forever—untrapped the possibilities of it. Would they have even liked each other? Whitman, the bold political revolutionary (though literature classes have forgotten that of him) who lamented “I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don�...

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They heave me into the boat,
my shell and legs encumbered
with barnacles.

I hear the scraping of their knives,
their eager voices, the sound of
writhing disease hitting the floor.

I have been sick with attachments.
My saviors delight in freeing me
as equally as they will delight
in their after-beer of celebration.

I am relieved to lose these barnacles,
but there is a disease that feels
much deeper—

there is a disease that will slip back
into the cool water with me
when they let me go.

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I love the poet Rumi. I think many of us who tend toward addiction also tend toward desperate, chaotic attempts at "love," which in the end are not true, real, pure love from the heart. Love that comes of pleading and coercing is not real love. We cannot truly love another until we learn to truly love ourselves. How can I love myself today?

Love

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                I have long had a fascination with Emily Dickinson, partly because of our shared birthday. Emily was born December 10, 1830 and I was born December 10th exactly 150 years later. From a young age I also enjoyed writing poetry and I encountered Dickinson's poetry for the first time when I was in middle school--it was the poem "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" in a children's book illustrated with frogs. :) I can't remember when it was I realized she and I shared a birthday,...

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I set my orange flowers in a boat and send them off to heaven.
I feel heaven raining down in drops of orange-scented love.
--Gabby Turner

This song is meant to be sung with the first line repeating 8 times, followed by 8 repetitions of the second line. That form is inspired by the singing I've been doing at the Kirtan and Meditation I go to twice a month. Devotional singing/chanting does not need variety, so much as devotion! The meaning is not lost through repetition, it is transcended, so that...
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                 The Scorpio(8th House)/Taurus(2nd House) axis has been a point of generational woundedness and healing in my family--and so I’m always interested in gaining a deeper understanding of how each sign/house operates.  I want to better understand how they function both distinct of each other as well as how they integrate their opposing energies (just as all oppositions challenge us to find a point of convergence). The film The Invention of Lying provides an excellent Piscean len...

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    There's an entire thread at tribe.net in which contributors post links to music that reminds them of Venus in Scorpio energy.  ;)  I often hear music, read books/poems/stories, or watch films that I find resonating with a particular astrological archetype (with Saturn or Neptune, for instance, or on one odd occasion even the 2nd/8th house axis).  So I thought it might be nice to begin a series here at the MetaQuizzical Blog called "Planetary Poetry." This is a very Neptunian way of gettin...
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