Sunday, December 21, 2008

shameless



Sometimes I feel invincible,
and for all that human frailty may try to keep me back
I am gonna just spit in its face,
'cause the fount of feeling that wells up in my breast,
the hurricane, thunderstorm, cavalcade, concerto
of overwhelming emotion that bursts forth from my soul,
Constantly,
is powerful as nine hundred million nuclear reactors on the face of the sun
and I simply must use this power for good.

I am omnipotent,
Able to accomplish astonishing feats like
Coaxing the unwilling to learn to love,
Overcoming internalized oppression so I feel really good about myself as a person,
Communicating remarkably well, all of the time,
and consistently being a considerate human being
while striving, aggressively, toward my dreams.

I am unabashed and unwilling to take no for an answer.
I can and will do it all,
Experience every raw moment this raucous life presents –
I will guzzle everyday miracles like a baleen whale sucking saltwater in the sea,
I will let life shove my face full of sweetness like she is my merciless newlywed,
I will nurture and tend like the thousand-breasted Artemis, and
I will ride life bareback like she was my bucking rodeo pony.
I will use the thorns of the Joshua tree soaked in cuttlefish ink to etch life’s pedigree permanently under my skin,
I will study like a scholar in an ivory tower and obtain the highest degrees –
Just you try to stop me!
And I will wail the cries of every widow war ever made, brokenhearted under the stars then
Like a Jedi on Dagobah I’ll levitate my spaceship above the murky abyss that tries to keep me from soaring light speed through the universe and
Turn even the most heinous of events into lessons I will be grateful to have learned.

I refuse to accept any assessment that I am
Too big, too loud, too wild, too proud and
when those words come toward me like bullets
I will pluck them delicately from the air
Pulverize them,
then blow the dust back in the faces of non-believers till they see…
There is no one as powerful as me,
No one as powerful as any one of us who insist
We live life by our hearts
We submerge ourselves fully in the complexities of existence and
Never ever apologize for what we are or
Who we want to be -
We who are shameless in our insistence that
We are fucking remarkable beyond belief.

(This piece inspired in part by a shameless scorpio beloved, a silver super sonic rock star, and a Death Cab for Cutie song I got turned onto by said silver rock star. The artwork above, also titled "Shameless," is by an amazing artist I just discovered named Stephanie Metz. She is a felted wool sculpture - wow. Please click to see more of her work once you have read my post, of course. Thanks Stephanie.)

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

rhetorical flourish


I am friends with a young fellow who I'll call M. M is four years old, tall for his age, blonde in a Dennis the Menace kind of way, and uncannily clever. He has a way with words far beyond his years and has a gentle, sensitive, inquisitive nature that often disarms people. He is so amicable people often do not know what to make of him. He is one of my favorite people.

One of the most delightful things about this young character is his penchant for describing and naming things in fabulous detail and with words you'd never expect out of the mouth of a four-year-old. A few weeks after Halloween he pointed out his family's forgotten jack-o-lanterns wasting away in the yard, and told me that those pumpkins were "decaying." Recently his mom told me a story about him explaining to her that he wanted to share his "loves" with her and then described his loves according to the colors and degrees of sparkliness as he saw them.

Today, while playing a game in which he attempts to surprise his mom and she is supposed to act scared, she overdid it and yelled out. M told his mom that her reaction was too loud and that he didn't like it. She asked him how she was supposed to act scared. "Maybe you could just cower," he told her. Yeah mom. Duh. Just cower next time.

But a different incident recently topped them all.

I was visiting with M a couple weeks back, and he wanted to show me one of his robots. He is quite into Transformers (one can hardly blame him; those guys are badass), and he introduced me to a battle worn robot he called Rhetorical Flourish.

"What?" I said, and looked to his mom for confirmation.

"Rhetorical Flourish," M said, with literal flourish. "This is Rhetorical Flourish and he likes to......" and whatever it is that M went on to tell me about Rhetorical Flourish I totally don't recall because I was in shock that I had heard what he had just said.

"What the hell?!" I asked his mom.

You see, M's parents are pretty serious Obama supporters. During the election they had the TV turned to MSNBC most nights taking in all the punditry they could in anticipation and hope for Obama's election. M was there, listening passively, and began endearingly referring to Obama as the president before the election ever happened. At some point M must have picked up that phrase and decided it was an apt name for his Transformer. He shocked his mother, though, the first day he asked her if she had seen Rhetorical Flourish. She said she reacted in much the way I did, asking "What?" with her jaw agape.

So yeah. Rhetorical Flourish. There's not much more I can say to compete with that.