C.J.Sellers

Hellbender Press, East Tennessee’s environmental news mag, may be returning as soon as January 2010:
http://www.metropulse.com/news/2009/nov/25/hellbender-press-plans-return/

An online film about new realities and new possibilities via Internet communication and collaboration

by C.J. Sellers

I.

I am the mother of “Fringe” who some say is a son-of-a-bitch (that makes me the bitch of origin). I gave him the name “Taylor” but now  he’s a hybrid of him now/him then so for the purposes of this poem I’ll refer to him as “Fringe Taylor”.

What of this nefarious person who was born more artist than citizen, born of an artist out on the fringe? “Spawn-of-a-fringe-bitch” (I coined a new epithet).
What of them?

I freely admit I am a Mother Bitch who encouraged a son’s phantasmagoria (read: delusions, psychosis, mania) if the allusions were just him, if the dangerous ideas were his choice;  his poetry and art, his to keep or give.
I called that freedom and eschewed medication.

Sparing the rod too, I tried not to mold him too much, to belittle nor otherwise oppress except when he didn’t do the dishes or keep his room clean or clean the dog up–no Internet. I didn’t teach him to fear dirt or darkness. I didn’t send him to the public schools that prepare for future slavery, uniformity, mediocrity, and blind obedience. I didn’t encourage him to covet, to consume, crave for approval, or live on credit, and by not doing so,  unleashed upon the harsh and authoritarian world, a new breed of crazy, starving artist, one without baggage.
For I insist his artists’ worth is not  in what quantifiable commodities are produced.

As other mothers polish A+ report cards, praise their childrens’ conformity with pride at this promise of high-paying job, I do not hide from you my guilty pleasure to see this young man sleeping happily outside, free, more or less with a backpack of worthless stuff and a thrift store guitar just pickin’  tunes and scribbling doodles in a notebook under the stars and among The Travelers.
Any pity in my heart is reserved for myself for harboring any foolhardy expectations for what would be or that he would always be at my side.

Some say poetry is more how the words are arranged. Some say art is how the medium is plied or paint laid. Some even call conversation an art. These may be the experts who say this, maybe the sideliners, spectators, or sometime-dabblers who don’t know what it means to be free much less express freely. Some just assert their bias. While they hate the cliche, I suspect they hate it so because they may live the cliche whereas Fringe and I accept these words that come upon like second hand clothes. My son ornaments them and makes of these his own clothes; he wants to think his own thoughts; choose his own words; be his own man. Whatever comes of it = Not cliche.
And I was the reckless author of him, this living story that went on to be a song of Himself.
I am Goddess, He is my art at a distance.

II.

A doctor tells me on the phone they have my son, that he’s crazy, delusional, psychotic, maybe even schizophrenic and they have him on medication. I don’t get defensive, I am truly alarmed but my true words and reasons are unhinged as I ask appropriate questions and navigate the institutional system. Soon I’m smiling, knowing they can’t see the smile growing on my face (relishing this private freedom). I’m smiling as my heart restores itself to faith when they describe his suspicious quirks.
They don’t know how they undo their work to release him to my “protective” embrace.

They’re releasing him because they say the medication’s working and so they pack him on a bus to me so we can have Thanksgiving together and I am thankful, I don’t wait to give thanks ’til Thanksgiving: that strange holiday that supposedly celebrates celebrating coalition, good food, and mutually independent volition. I don’t believe those pioneers who broke bread with the “savages” were as frightened then as our herd of contented Americans are now, such easy pickins for The Man, so ripe for harvest.
(I can’t wait to see him.)

III.

Fringe Taylor got on the phone then and told me about The Harvesters and what “the harvest” means. He said there are belief harvesters there now, he’s there among them. (This is supposed to be more of his delusional thinking.) But I, his mother, mother of his mind, I see the metaphor and understand.
I wait for the bill to come in the mail.

While there’s time before the bus back home departs, Fringe tells me of his travels, of long walksand hunger, meals stolen, and confesses he is craving for his first “legal” whiskey in a bar he hopes to share with me, his mother, his closest family and lifelong friend. He describes drug experimentation past and done. He tells of books, ideas, and wondrous things, of strange people and places (but spares the fucks), describes beautiful fireworks observed from a mountaintop, where he spent the night in some temple and I ask if he saw the forests burn in Los Angeles. Though he was there, strangely, he did not. It was there he was found naked and wandering (read: out of his mind) and was soon incarcerated. He says he cut his dreads off while in jail, where he was sent for panhandling.  But not because anyone told him to– because he saw “the signs”. (Don’t think it’s drugs, he wasn’t on them. I’ve been assured that he was tested.) He proceeds to tell me of apprenticing to a western psychic, of interstate bus rides and concert tours and crowds, of peyote and graves in New Mexico and of solitary pilgrimages to nowhere in particular, of friends he’s made, and love, about new music, and a world clock that he swears someone said connects EVERYTHING and is directed from above by four invisible people on a plate, suspended by a bird.  I wonder if this is crazier than believing in God. I am so proud of him and of us, of This. How many mothers hear their sons speak and hear their souls unleashed in the words?
Doctors point “word salad”, my heart paints poetry.

by William Blake

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God, our father dear:
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.

I enjoyed watching this video again. Howard Zinn discusses the idea that violence and warfare are “Human nature”.

by C.J. Sellers

Between walls and hills
where green booze bottles
splay fragmented among the dead
fish and coal fly ashes,
beside shores where too much
or too little grows well,

Between body bags and body farm,
diseased needles and crusted,
discarded, bloody condoms
that in this Sodom tells
of love or desperation?

Between tidy lies and lawns,
between votes cast, lots pulled,
and elections bought or won,
freedoms lost, greased palms,
and bills crimes committed
by lobbyists and politicians,

Between cracked panes and arrests,
twisted arms and vain protests,
obscenities and wrists vented,
bullet-riddled premises
or alerts to 911 sent,

Between the shots and bombs
fired or lobbed in revenge
at peopled church pews
or from or at a Muslim
(it makes no difference),

Between commercial breaks,
and the sweet mountaintop wastelands
of Southern Appalachia, my home,
where Bibles were once
banged but now are hugged,
where creeks and wells
polluted with cow dung
and pesticides, coal
fines and rubble come
from what began a
mountain but is now
a pillar of salt,

Between the ears and in hearts
too preoccupied to hear or feel,
between U.S. and them,
and prayers for us and ours,

In a barn beneath a golden calf tarred
and papered with devalued cash
that was once our dreams and labor
lies a new and naked child,

And what of it?

[Author's Note: The title, "Between Lots", as well as the first paragraph are references to two short poems, listed below. "Lots", "Sodom", "Pillar of Salt", and "Golden calf" are all references to the Bible. This poem is staged outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, at the foot of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, specifically, at the foot of Clinch Mountain, in "Rich Valley". On the other side of the mountain lays "Poor Valley". Once upon a time, beyond this point was considered the "Wild West" and I live along the Wilderness Road settlers once traveled to get there. This mountainous region was populated with a stubborn breed of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, later turned Southern Baptist. My husband's family is of this ilk, the Whites and Sellers families. His Whites came over on the Mayflower.

The poem is generally about the degradation of the demarcation between the old ways and the new and the rural and urban here in this place.  At various points, it's about a loss of individual identity, loss of faith, loss of blissful ignorance of what goes on elsewhere, and about theft of value and "family values".

The stanza about politics is about the loss of faith in people in positions of authority who write the laws Americans live by. It's a story told from rural/conservative point of view, invaded by an onslaught of "liberal depravity" and midway through, the urban idyllic is suddenly attacked by the conservative when guns are fired at peopled church pews, this is a reference to a shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville.

Here and there, I've blurred the line between the urban and rural with fuzzy logic, confusing the point of view. This is an expression of the Quantum Aesthetic.

When I wrote it, I had recently read "Between Walls" by William Carlos Williams and "Between Two Hills" by Carl Sandburg. My intention was to fill in the space between the lots characterized in these poems and give voice to the anguish of losing an idyllic, agrarian social identity. It's both from my perspective and not as I'm a liberal living in an highly conservative area. I'm no fundamentalist but I cannot remain truly separate from the perspectives of my family and neighbors here in rural East Tennessee.

Other local news/cultural references include the TVA coal ash spill, mountaintop removal, NPS contamination of water in this karst region, the UTK body farm. Larger issues (local to national and world lots) include the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan, and national politics.  As of 2009, fewer rural people own a computer or often use the Internet than in the cities and urban suburbs.  Much of this news is brought here via the television.

"In ...Appalachia...where Bibles were once banged but now are hugged" is a reference to the threat of religious relativism and postmodernism denying the authority of a single doctrinal narrative. Here again, about loss, the church has experienced an increasing loss of new membership over the years. Young people increasingly look elsewhere than religion to find the meaning of existence.

Additionally, there is symbolism in certain pairings and choices of wording that I won't get into here for the sake of brevity.]

Between Walls by William Carlos Williams

the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle

Between Two Hills by Carl Sandburg

Between two hills
The old town stands.
The houses loom
And the roofs and trees
And the dusk and the dark,
The damp and the dew
Are there.

The prayers are said
And the people rest
For sleep is there
And the touch of dreams
Is over all.

One of my favorite films. When I first saw this so many years ago, it was an eye-opener. I later picked up a copy of  Fritjof Capra’s “The Tao of Physics” and began to find my place in the order of things, as part of the interconnected whole.

by C.J. Sellers

Tonight
Bone wonders why he goes out
wandering at night.
Why all this looking
in windows wrongly?
What? For spite?
He asks himself.

Bone’s so disgusted with himself.
“You don’t care ’bout nothin’,”
he says as he undresses to go.

“So what’s wrong with you?”

He can’t defend himself
from himself. He answers
shyly, “I think I may be
looking for someone
and I wander if it’s true.
No I wander even if it’s not true.”
He laughs even though
it’s not funny at all.

He does wonder.

Is it even a him or a her?
Is it even a him or a her?
Is it even a him or a her?

Bone struggles for a face.

It’s getting even
worse as the days go by.
Bone goes through the days now
faking his way through
waiting for the moment
waiting for the sun,
waiting for it to…
go down so he can slip out.

Sometimes Bone hears them arguing.

Sometimes they’re making love.
Sometimes…

Sometimes they’re making love.

Sometimes he gets thirsty
while he’s out.

Maybe he wanders because
when he dreams he’s
lost, alone, out in
some wasted space
with no one in sight,
not for miles. Not,
no not for miles and miles.
This makes him feel like
such a child.

This makes him so hungry.

He hears dogs barking in the distance.
He hears a car start and drive away.
Then so much nothing.

And Bone wonders if this is
the way things outta be,
if he should be alone
and if so why? “What did I
ever do so very wrong?”
he asks aloud
to the mirror.

He imagines the pain, and
imagines again, the pain
of the cuts on his knuckles
if it breaks.

Sometimes he brings along a bone
or some bacon. Now the dogs are
his friends. He goes and gets
something now. Something for
the ones who are
not his friends.

He’s got his answer
and it makes him angrier
than it should.
Now he’s so angry
and he’s so angry,
he’s so angry
and he dunno
why.

If fades again.
But he knows it will return.

Sometimes he hears a child cry.

So tonight he hopes luck
will work its magic,
he hopes it will all work,
work itself out.

He hopes this time someone
looks out a window,
looks back at him and
he knows, he knows he
don’t care if they like it.
Just let them look
at him once. Let
them see his…

Look out,
look out the window,
come and look, come. Now.
Yesterday. No, way back when.
Way back before all this began.

LOOK AT ME. Pick a fight. Pull out a gun.

Sometimes he wants to open the window
and go right on inside.

He’s so bored of waiting.
He’s so tired of wandering.

Tonight
something will happen.
He can hardly wait.

He licks his lips and shifts.

Unarmed and unguarded,
he goes out, he goes out
and leaves. Bone leaves
his sad self behind.

“is of” by C.J.Sellers

Every thing’s perfect; perfectly imperfect; it is. Will it be? What ever was, it’s always as.

I am the I AM; everything!! Yet nothing without Us. Want it, won’t it? Will it, be it. Within, just as just this.

Isn’t I AM Wrongful Righteous without Us justice? Beauty is only as she does. He who is lovely acts love. Axioms. The seed as sown, about and in Us this will-fruit’s grown.

Where will was/is/shall therein there begins/I AM/ends Us of.

[Author's Note: This is another Quantum Aesthetic poem. Fuzzy logic point of view, blurring of the individual being separate from the whole. The execution is evidence that I can't approach any subject that involves religion in a completely serious manner. This poem could be summarized as the Judeo-Christian God attempting to comment on His creation and respond to the complaints of his creation regarding fairness or whatever.  God just has a hard time relating and putting it in human terms, coming from an omniscient, time-insensitive, infinite and unending of person/persona point of view. I refute that God would speak in anything but banal cliches and axioms. The confusion is intentional. No, I'm not surprised if you have a problem grasping it. I grasped it briefly and then it was gone again. Once in a while it comes back. It's like staring at one of those 3D stereogram images.

To think that God created everything, is aware of everything, is part of everything ever created or that will be, and then expecting him to listen to one person's complaint or plea like customer service or a caring parent, I'm sorry, I just find this ridiculous. This is not to say that I disbelieve in the power of prayer. I just don't think everything is likely just as we humans conceive. Nevertheless, we are the gods of our own individual perspectives, and so is God of His.  ]

Come today and speak at the hearing regarding the new nuclear bomb factory in Oak Ridge. More info: http://tinyurl.com/bombfactory