Substance [from some months ago]

Dear Aunt Pat,

I wish we could find a shared setting for a few days so that we could talk about the great discoveries, the fireworks of life with unbridled enthusiasm; but that we might also have time to discuss with curiosity the quiet truths of life, the substances that remain unshakeable that may be the greater priority, but who knows; and why do the gains and roars of life seem at odds sometimes with the stillness of observation. When the stillness is found it does then regain the same glory, no? It is going away from the thing to gain the thing.

Is this a love letter? Maybe. Is that strange? Probably. But who knows the distinguishing of anything, and what is the longing to connect? and is that love? and does it overlap into intimacy of sprawling descriptions and assumptions, and does it oblige to commitment and what is the story of it from me, the feminine me? toward females who communicate more thusly. And when I find the other version, I am refreshed with the unshakeable, earthen foundations of communicating with Uncle Bill, the hat I so often forget to put on – constancy versus the addiction of the wind.

What of this life? I do want to know from you. We share some things, and often I am the idiot poet.

There are funds to publish poetry on posters and put them up in scattered spots reserved for advertising on the subways of New York. Most often they would bring me joy and the sensation of pause in the more clamorous chambers of the city. There is one that was my favorite, and when it would appear I would work to memorize it.

I am an orchid
washed in on the salt
white beach.

Memory –
what can I make of you now that might please you –
this life, already wasted,
and still strewn with miracles.

And so my mind continues to bathe in poetic sensation, though its skin gets dangerously soft from absorbing and not quitting; and my mind is a tragic desert of liberal arts education, any specifics continuing to flee out its windows while striving for euphoric, experience-based systems and answers. And I am in school for the philosophy of action but there is no academia here. And that is because I believe in things so fully that I have a habit of believing they are absolute, and the only absolute of the world is the great menagerie of materials that are necessary for life to continue in a logic well beyond us. Adaptation and continuity and color.

And so we have to choose our systems, and I feel very far from that these days.

Tim