C.J.Sellers

by C.J. Sellers

You asked what it was. It was snow.
I told you then a Once upon a time
about the traveling water–
how it changed and moved,
mostly never still for long,
then never thinking of what it was
or will be again–now a tear, now blood
from a scrape, now spit out, now steam
and vapor, now snow out there, on everything
looking white as these walls, white as stars,
as your itsy-bitsies, white as your eye sparkles.
No whiter! In the moonlight it’s nothing but stars
out there to dream of.

I told you some time later, time for a change,
better you go and get out, learn to be something new.
You said you didn’t need to be told.
(You were afraid to go.) I was ignoring you,
busy to read at random, as if earnest.

They stalk prey in shallow water, often running
or shuffling their feet, flushing prey into view,
as well “dip-fishing” by flying with their feet just
over the water. Snowy Egrets may also stand still
and wait to ambush prey, or hunt for insects stirred
up by domestic animals in open fields.

Aeons! You’re on the road.
Traveler. Just a little push, a nudge
and such violence to the heart!
Betrayal? Never-mind that it
happens all the time to anyone.
It’s this ice behind the eyes;
ice in the throat; all this snow,
who can’t see to drive? I should show more.
The mind thinks it has a right,
it thinks too much of… What? I honestly don’t know.
More nothing now. I hear nothing.
When I hear, I know. I know enough
to know I know nothing. Wait…
are these motes snow or ash?

Later still, you’ve changed into…
Something else. Strange. What did I expect?
Right now it’s not working out so…
You come home. I’m actually glad. I take you back.
I take it all back. I make room, I unsettle.
I un-birth, un-wean, even un-not-sorry.
But you’re righteous too tall now;
too angry and worn down from forced-being-a-man.

Soon enough–no, not right.
I have no right. No, you have no…
So now I know. It can never be
Once upon a time rain and snow again.
Now it’s risk of cold and loss and
I miss you before you’re gone.
You’re walking away in the rain.
You say you’ll let me know your new name
some day. But first, you want to know
the last words I’ll say before you go.
I have nothing to say. This time I let it be.

What is that? That first smell
of rain on pavement, I can taste it
in my throat, it makes my eyes well up,
it makes me want to rise up
and fall from the sky.

“The Beginning and End of” by C.J. Sellers

Out of the noisome back woods hollows,
from under a rock, birthed from an ichor,
out into the sun or moon respectively,
lumbers the squamous, one-eyed behemoth
who, by due process, has two lively aspects:
how he appears to some, and what he does.
The latter is wholly unknown to him.
The former, to the unobservant, he’s
as Nietzsche says, “human, all too human”.

Our creature has creative cyclopean vision.
Inversely, where all he walks or aspires,
what the eye won’t value (by will, whim, or chance)
is soon erased to non-existence.

Our “Human” crawls out his hollow one too early morn’
to wait for the sun to rise so as to trawl, catch,
and tell his wishes to the face of God
but as he’s never seen it, in seeking now,
he never saw how when setting out
and not seeing what his mind’s eye sought,
in blunder, he’s effaced his God outright.
So much for metaphysics.

[Author's note: inspired by Neitsche's  "Human, All Too Human, A Book for Free Spirits", Chapter I. Of First and Last Things-18. Basic Questions of Metaphysics and also, H.P. Lovecraft's, "The Lurking Fear" and "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse.]

by C.J. Sellers

You’ll know this dog by where he’s at.
We’ll try some apophasis:

Not restin mid the dusty grasses,
scratch rollin neath the sky.

Not hot at those pickup trucks,
chase barkin down the roads.

Not slackin as the children splash,
soon shakin off the hose.

Not jumped through the barbed cow fence,
now givin them cuts a lick.

Not passin through the dairy barn,
caught stealin just a sip.

Not peerin through the kitchen door
sweet charmin for some scraps.

Not guardin gruff the grain silo,
fast chasin round the cats.

Not found out at the marshy pond,
just starin at a toad.

Not sleepin neath the hangin sheets,
chance soilin all the clothes.

Not runnin long the youngster’s side,
out huntin for a prize.

Head now to the master’s bed,
he’s dreamin of command.

~For Andrew Wyeth~
(July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009)
Inspired by the painting “Master Bedroom”
http://poietes.files.wordpress.com/2…er-bedroom.jpg

“Her Welsh Testament” by C.J. Sellers

“As promised, the illustrious Mrs. Woosnam,” claims the patron, her great-grandson, grandly ushering. She enters, garbed in a proud, violet gown, her gait, somewhat unsteady and wrong, like worn, bleached wood that’s been afloat too long, that now I’ve found on this foreign land. And around she brings her island’s home, Wales, dragging its proud veil, affixed like a net in tow.  Her presence bends the New  World back ’til it succumbs. Elbow gently mugged by the young man’s dutiful hand, she’s sat down, put in a chair in the good light.

He whispers, “Paint her young. It’s a gift. Don’t bother chatting. Doesn’t know a word of English.” He turns and speaks her native tongue; a wild strangeness he domesticates with,”Mum”. She nods,  smiling, and lets him kiss an ashen hand, then holds his, tight at first, as if she won’t let go. The feather falls, the moment’s warmed.

Now alone, I turn my canvas to her still frame and the easel legs scrape, resounding, confounding the awkward day Now follows smiles and blushes and quickly on to choosing paints, brushes… So I’m gazing, mixing, dabbing at the pallet… Paining for some momentum and hours later, still not painting. I look to her. I’m searching and I can see the light has plait parched lines across her arms that press deeper down the hour hand. Light pervades the icy blue globe of her farthest eye that must want to squint to see the street below or look inward or want to sleep or so I imagine her. The neatly up-swept crown is haloed with a disarray of fine, white hair, counterweight by sulky shadows in the standing hollows of the nape below. That sweet face that must have once held charm. Nothing smooth now but all fair. Just as I am to press my brush down, I despair and want to speak but she’s been wise. She knows English. I don’t know Welsh. I’m no Brit, no need to gloat, but I’m American. My television has never once mentioned her home. What do I know? I cannot know the stubborn place of root there. She comes and sits politely for her grandson in silent testament but can’t expect much from a blind, American painter, this inviolate Welshman, Mrs. Woosnam.

[Author's note: inspired by,"A Welsh Testament" by by R. S. Thomas and "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009).]

No, I tell you, it was an ordinary day when things first gave way in my mind.  Things were going along just fine, had been for a long time; uneventfully, in fact.

You think that crazy comes on gradually (least I did), that you have time to head it off at the pass, so to speak. Not for me at least. No, not in the least.

I think of crazy people and what comes to mind are like I dunno, gray and fearful, mumbling, twitching bunnies,  (though some not so tame).

I’m fumbling for words here…

Ah, what do I know of crazies? I’m talking to myself right now on a computer, seems less strange but it ain’t  necessarily so.  The doctor says I don’t seem crazy and so there’s none of that *tension*, you know… talking ’bout crazy stuff is just somethin’ we like to chat about now and then.

For instance, did you know crazy people are not strangers to reason. Their reasons just aren’t the norm. Or so I’m told.

Sanity is friends with the empirical I gather. The empirical is just that which can be proven …to a doctor. We’re supposed to agree on what’s “real”.

Tchyeah right.

Why don’t they see the gift it is to flee from reason and the tyranny of consensus? Don’t tread on me. My crazy don’t need a reason. I don’t have no  hang-ups or fixations, what have ya…

I don’t need a reason nor some professional validation to accept what I see clearly here before me: this ghost, this inexplicable, ridiculous apparition. I’m not even afraid of it. No, I have to laugh, just from startling when I catch sight of it. Otherwise, there’s not so much to be jolly ’bout at the moment. So I don’t mind the ghost(s) even if you can’t enjoy them.

Yes, there’s more than one.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s what I thought before this, those Hollywood ghosts, those Poe-ish, Gothic ghosts and so forth but no, sorry to disappoint.

This ghost right here appeared sitting in our old rocking chair. But I tell you, and try to imagine this, ha-ha…get this…
it’s just the soul

OF THE CHAIR!

Ain’t that a hoot?
hahahahahaha

And it talks.
hahahahahaha

And what it talks about is so boring!
hahahahahaha

You know, if you could imagine what a chair would know…
hahahahahaha

Well now I know. If you don’t have a sense of humor, then be glad you don’t see  (and hear) my ghosts.

Oh, one other thing I found out here,  crazy people don’t think they’re crazy.
But I do. Ipso facto, I’m not.
hahahahahaha
Whateva.

Are you comfortable? Would you like a chair? Oop, don’t sit there, not in that one…
hahahahahaha

Oh my goodness what she just said about your ass…
Ahem…let’s leave it there
shall we?

[Author's Note: "Powys' Ghosts" was inspired by the works of John Cowper Powys wherein ordinary things have spirits and lives all their own and communicate with one another, even human spirits.]

Personality is the only permanent thing in life; and if truth, beauty, goodness, and love, are to have permanence they must depend for their permanence not upon some imaginary law in a universe half-created by personality but upon the indestructible nature of personality itself. ~ John Cowper Powys, from “The Complex Vision“

by C.J. Sellers

Venus Libertina, my Sophia,
death’s muse who would be widow,
now peers through my prison window,
whose invention’s she, the gods’ or man’s?

What her seekers set in motion:
those Zoroastrians sought her union
with the King of Gods–did they there, that hour
merge me, mere Yeshua, syncretic:
Aeneas, Buddha, Mithras; Mazda; Horus?

Beyond the din of captive bodies and their ignorance,
beyond armies claiming mandate of the Logos,
beyond enslaving orthodoxy, beyond ideal,
beyond form’s confusion, beyond the lie, beyond words,
hear you how my muse sings forth
endless, inhuman excogitation?
So why then do the Romans call this morning light
love’s seed and inspiration?

Magna Mater to no one, she beckons, “End,”
trotting out her hot, barren orb
slow and languid ’round, a careful compass,
erstwhile, men contrived their epics, magic
mysteries, tragic and comedic skits in the
quintessence of her dark, emblazoned skirts.

Insensate, she elucidates the divine path,
seen past, of small part finds our humble earth.
Her mandala lucubrates secret truths
awaiting a nirvana to be parsed.

You, Judas, once mused how my captors praise
the many stars and not the One. I’d have laughed,
yet, my gaze was fixed upon impending gnosis.

There’s precious nuance praxis hinges on.
If I should say, “There is no darkness here
without some light,” could faithless Peter
build a church upon what he thrice denied?

They’ll paint my Venus pale, a virgin,
for Constantine’s militia will hate the women.
Sprung from a rock was their Mithras.
They’ll deign Peter rock, not you, Judas,
nor Mary Magdalene nor Judas Thomas.
For you my friend, just “traitor”.
I am sorry. You understood Us.

For you, dear Judas, not for silver,
for a kiss, I offer bread as parting gift:
follow and own your own cross to Pleroma.
Mind silent, we’ll both find Libertina.

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.

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.

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.