C.J.Sellers

by C.J. Sellers

She’s running away to a Nevada bordello.
Knuckles spell out a  N-E-U-R   O-T-I-C  plea.
Hitch a ride with a truck-stop hello.
She’s running away.

Unmasked, there’s not much these ringed cat’s eyes don’t see.
Dark cobalt dreads bunched in a black bow.
Below, orange roots show and tell. This world ain’t free.

Where her breast folds sleeves of a tattooed bolero,
scarred veins snake to a laden tree.
Just needs some fast cash to blow.
She’s running away.

by C.J.Sellers

you there who are a bullet
and the gun and the hand and the wound
not knowing your without or within
you think you cannot know your purpose
until the action or the war’s won

you don’t see start, trajectory, or end all
you think, you lose, you win, you wind eternal
you nonsense exegesis spectacle

you think this is your heart’s now
you think this is your place here
you feel you know the reason anyhow

you thief, cop, martyr, monkey, Hyperborean
shoot your godsend, suck the treason, wile
fuck, breed, eat, shit, beat, breathe, dial

you think you are between or as you are
you tower, you to and from
you sweet and salt of

you one, you one, you one
you one of many who make your one
you body, cell, nucleus, quantum, logos, holy ghost

you seed, planet, universe
you’re flat, you’re round, you’re diaphanous
you’re subjective and objective as

you god, you speak your logos wrong
you speak it like a web to catch all
you fateful aspect spinning sins and angels

you past, you present, you future danger
you part and participle, noun
you solo, orchestral, polyphonic child

you sun and moon, you all and nothing
you lives, you deaths, you births
you sentient, loud and silent sound

you unity of all of
you one who has no name to speak of
you who is and is of
[...]

by C.J.Sellers

Woman is a jar of untold jellybeans.
Who keeps a jar of jellybeans? Why?
Who wants a jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who knows the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who owns the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Answer: Just the woman. I say it oughtta be the law.

by C.J. Sellers

Willy blasts into the air in an iconic splash, escaping the bad men’s wrath faster than I could have plunged into its ocean depths. And to see this, I should thus feel suddenly more human?

Of course, the movie pushed all the right buttons, I wept, I laughed, I felt suspense but because I am who I am, in some ways, predetermined, I get the sense afterward, that of some things, the human is too curious and vainglorious for its to-some-irrelevant revelations. We are too proud of our “inherent” sentience and emotion. We give the animal a human name–”Willy” for the kids. But that’s just where it begins, this anthropomorphizing anything from God to black fish.

“Free Willy”, a play on “free will”.

The sick plea behind this movie is that our prey must have a human face before we spectators, can’t help ourselves but agree not to contain, hunt, kill it, or call it prey. By omission of threat, we are free to call it friend. That is “Free Willy”.

Where is the respect for Orca as it is? It is not cute. It carries its steely knives at the fore whereall it goes, rather than behind its back as us. That is not a human face. Why pretend? It offends my sense of otherness necessary to understand this world’s true wholeness in which human is a pestilence.

Skinner would ask, why do we hastily determine an animal can be “freed”? Is it due to apparent sentience? We are sentient. Are we free? Are you sure of that? Do we all agree? This has yet to be confirmed through logic or dogma, so in Willy’s defense toward the nature of default, mankind’s “free will” is simply a matter of opinion.

Roman men named Orcus a god of the underworld. Orca is a hunter of whales, yes, which is the largest of all living things but he’s as complex as our senator or Caesar in his domain. Yet we’d make him a kid’s pet? Rather predictable, yes? Does it help to understand the Orca any better to do this, or not just us as slavers, saps, and showmen?

Wittgenstein would say if I had an interpreter for a dog’s language, what would it matter? Just as, can I know what it is to know the dolphin’s life or the nature of its fate? We both breath air, may eat the same foods, both birth live kin, we are both gods and demons, but touch his skin and my repugnance tells–it is alien. I could press my lips against its flesh but would I as I’d kiss some random human being? Even if I felt disgust, this distaste is not the same from whale to human.

If I could lock Willy in a pen and feed him mammals or fish, “amazing” what good friends we’d become. We’d be more than. I’d be master of him but am I master if I then compulsively serve Mammon?

Am I comforted that the Orca eats the thing that would eat me? Therefore, we are friends? This is as the proverb goes and again, “It is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.”

Because I am not to his appetite’s affinity then I am not his enemy?
Because I don’t eat the mammals he eats therefore, we are friendly?

What does this “friendship” mean? What is this obsession of human’s to find meaning? Is it shared by him? If so, how can I know what it means to him and not just what it would mean to me if I were him? As if I could ever be.

If “Free Willy” had been beached. I could walk a mile of sand to look into just one of his large eyes, imagined enormous to match his girth and wit, fierce and fiery as alleged thirst for vengeance. But what if it’s blank and dark and weak, as small as the palm of my hand? Is he then like us?

The sounds he would make, chirps and coos, more like a bird of prey than a baby man are these anything I could understand even if I had a dolphin lexicon?

Tell all this to the Orca. He could not care less. The sounds that come to him are as meaningless. I’m just saying, I stand at the shoreline, human. To his ocean, I can do no more than delve a toe in!

I could stroke his spanse as a connoisseur or a lover and he, with no arms to resist this, dumb to my language to even protest, and I of a species that contains rapists, he’d on land, succumb to the rape of my imposed friendship.

I exploit him now just to write about him much less make a movie about us or pay money to watch our adventure “together”. A spectator is not innocent.

On land, how easily I could skin him thus, strip him bare just to see what’s underneath and some humans do in fact, do this. Good thing he has no convenient, toothless orifice. Just let him try to grow legs and traverse the sand to look straight into mankind’s great and glorious face.

I could kill and eat this contender just as easily as he could hunt down a shark for its liver, in our avarice. But there’s a difference. He eats for food, Human consumes for mere amusement and entertainment.

I will prove to you I am his master, here he is “Free Willy” trapped on DVD. He is forever immortalized thus and his only escape is our thirst for novelty will eventually render this conception of him bland and tasteless.

Someday, the human, for its ignorance and proliferation that rapes the land and now the sea, may one day soon eat its own weak and while the Orca may hunger for the food it lost to us, its avarice and cunning is not as great as it needs to be to survive our trust.

It must grow armor and harden its teeth to torpedo our ships. It must toxify the fish with a poison to which it hopes to form a resistance. It must stake claim to its domain by freezing it with a glacial crust. And if it does all this, then it may become human. And then it will know of man’s inhumanity.

Already, I am developing a taste for Orca.
Someday soon, Willy, you’ll be mine.

But for now, while I can I would rather leave the Orca alone to its mysteries, free to be whatever it is, wherever, and at the very least,
blessedly, anonymously inhuman.

[Author's note:  Title refers to behavior psychologist,  B.F. Skinner and the movie, "Free Willy".  ]

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).]

“An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.” — Arthur S. Eddington

“We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.” — Arthur S. Eddington

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“