There Are Movies (Thinking)

After watching what could possibly be one of the best films I have ever watched in The Tree of Life, I left paralyzed at what I witnessed. Albeit, I intermittently nodded off during the films final segments, I couldn't help but rejoice in the pornographic sensation I encountered while watching. If movies could shed their clothing -and believe me, they can- then The Tree of Life bares all. I'm certain that everyone in the theater, all but seven or so UC Irvine college students on summer break, felt as though they had just watched a family endure strenuous chances -those that potentially come to demolish an entire household- from outside a living room window, peeping in. Contrite, maybe. Pleasurable, definitely. And yet while I endeavored to translate the whispers emitted by the films central character, Jack, I couldn't help but feel exposed just as he.

But why do I feel this way? Does being exposed make you a more rounded person, a more complete human being? In committing mischievous acts, and disobeying his parents, Jack grinds hard against the fundamental construction of the American Family, which is what Bradd Pitt's character attempts to create. But sons are not created to follow their fathers, or at least in Western Culture, they tend to follow another path. The Mother's passive allegiance to her children reflects what love exists in the family continuity. Yet love is not continuous. And the perpetual feeling that destruction will exist at some point and is equally inevitable in the Earth's life, let alone human life, I and presumably those others in the theater watching the movie, feel as though all was for nought.... or at least to misunderstand a little bit more of this life.

Elephant's Matter

flaccid hoary 

skin -gunmetal

would have

been a play

on words, of

words would

have made it

theater.

Cartoons

Macerating Lemons

Words have failed, writings have failed, and seeing failed,

along with other failures: thinking, swearing, screaming,

breathing...

all have failed beautifully.

It's history razored out of the rind.

And although the water wells have run dry,

there persists in the scant, dusking sunlight,

a pale labelled, 

indistinctly,

"for the heart, another time".

Not Unique in Trying to Be

What is it we find in the end
that hasn't approached us so?
The crashing waves
at our vessel's hull
(china bowls skating from their decorated spots),
pounding hearts into pounding.
Fathers need tell
their sons to never stroll
in the corralling
flame by their lonesome.

Clack

Some things just sound pretty.

When Colors Wane (Return Again)

For a while now I had the suspicion that I'd fade away like the simplest memory. That at the end of a day sometime in the near future, I would become the diminishing recollection of a grandson I could not influence. It was almost too easy for me to consider my future, and to think back on my childhood youth, and all but realize that I could not return. I sense that few of us understand our departure from the naive imagination, however immature it was, and however misunderstood we were. We can never go back. I can never go back. And I'd argue that some of us feel that way: that we could return sometime in the next fifty years to those moments when we were twelve, passing the ball across the black top, running wildly into the grass, cartwheeling over clover patches, and digging around inside our desks, grabbing at objects that would allow our minds to wander away from what our teachers lectured about. But, no matter, I will awake tomorrow with the same misunderstanding: that I will become a child again, and that I will not fall apart like all things, and that when I ponder the empty spaces left on this earth, there will be something to fill them with architecture, with love, passion, propriety, fullness, and color.