My dear friends,
Many of you may know that I am leaving Chicago.  I start my new job in May, and I am excited and a little scared for this new epoch in my life.  I wrote the following, as a tribute to the city that has taught me so much in this madcap year.
-LC

Dear Chicago
Goodbye city, will you miss me,
I'll miss you, that much is true.
Goodbye parks and bars and people
Goodbye dreams I dreamed in you.

Farewell sunswept glistening water,
Greater oceans I've yet to find.
Farewell friends and farewell neighbours,
New hearts and hopes are to be mine.

Goodbye lakeshore, concerts, picnics,
In the sun in Lincoln Park
Scraping-sky iconic buildings
Jazz and blues, beloved landmarks.

Maybe someday I'll return here,
Still a dreamer, not so young.
Keep your promise, keep your people,
Til my wandering days are done.

A man spread-eagled on a sweaty bed
implores his lady for death on a cross
rather than face again this aftertaste of loss,
failing of lust and hunger for the dead.

Quick, one moment before, pulsing heat,
clung to a mattress and called for a mother,
holding to holy dreams of another
where a whole is absent between the sheets.

Frantic, the moment comes to its dire need,
and man makes his plea to heaven and earth
to save him from sea or skewer him straight
and, grieving, scatters his unlanded seed,
knowing this raft forlorn cannot hold birth,
empty of desire, except for a mate.


-JMK

It's the magic time of evening,
when I leave my work  and light-swept dusk has stolen, mischievous, through city streets
Not twilight, but  a softer cold, lit by city lights and coming Christmas.
It's the magic time of evening,

And carols drift their careless selves 'round corners in the face of coming night
Shadows hollow out the basins, gray, of buildings that have hid their faces for the close of day
Like party garb, their tinselled twinkling finery masks small flaws seen by sun-
It takes my breath away.

As turning a corner suddenly the
faux-white front of a building whose face you thought you knew can give  a gasp-
expressionless-
as strong as the bone-cold of stern winds off the lake that pierce your jacket through just to say, "Hello- you are."
But all the cold in the world can't erase the glow-feeling of those long-lived shadow-hewn lights. 
And in the magic of the moment, all (my love) is right.

-LC

(a  conversational response to the last two beautiful posts)

Autumn pulls on summer’s cloak, hiding itself under the guise of August heat. In long, smooth breaths, it sweeps away its incriminating red leaves, clearing all signs of September off the streets. Hearing the promising bark of these dog days, you dive backwards into crisp water and the bright clarity of July.

--But fall pulls you back out with a falconer’s call, with a commandingly cold wind. Tree branches cringe and chatter restlessly. Having found warm days folded away, chilled mornings snake across glazed streets, hurrying no when, no where (in fear?) Summer fades with these suncold days and you write 73 sonnets in desperate endeavor to keep him here--you send out a raven to look for his voice, but it returns like an echo.

(three days and already you’re losing your youth)

You grow weary of living inside this skeleton heart, this stoic space. June fades too soon and the wind blows you away, astray, and you become a wanderer, singing out in a nervously soulfull voice, with fear and trembling in your shadow.

Halfway (underway), you come to a place where moonlight midnight streetlight dims and a winged shadow hums against your skin. Like a creature native and indued unto this element, you dive 
in

to this darkness, where river streams trickle down from dreams, & you are light dancing on the tips of waves, a plant reaching for the moon. we die too soon, you tell me, but I say to your lips with my lips, We love not soon enough--We do not drink enough forest air! We blow through like wind, too quickly, too loudly to hear the crunching of autumn and the light of the sun.

So I will you scatter you like Orpheus: you will become laughter and songs that run from stream to stream and leap towards the sun. And having stole a slice of it, you will rain down and return to us, to life, with fiery stories of beauty and metamorphosis.

Once, in a faraway land, there was a Temple-Keeper, who was part of an ancient, esoteric Brotherhood. The Temple-Keeper was not yet a fully initiated Priest of the Order; he was a novice and wore a novice’s garb, a simple brown cassock woven from rough yarn. He had been commanded by the Brotherhood to keep one of their many holy Temples around the world, and had been sent to the far-flung peninsula where the Temple stood.


Although the Temple was officially the property of the Order, the Temple was his. He was its Keeper. He and it lived together on this remote peninsula, away from people. The Temple was really only a small shrine, a stone hut by some standards, but it was his hut and he was its soul. A work of simple but beautiful masonry, it stood on a high rock bluff overlooking the sea. A line of trees waited further back from the cliff, but the Temple stood out on the open rock outcropping. The tan stones of the Temple formed triangular peaks on the sides and back; the front presented a row of stoical, unadorned columns. On the roof of the Temple, in the four corners, small fantastical creatures carved out of stone stood sentinel. On the inside, images of the Honored Deities filled the space in the form of statues tucked back in enclaves, and adorned the walls in the form of icons painted on sheets of metal, exquisitely depicted in priceless blue, gold, and red dyes. At the back of the Temple were a few steps leading up to the Altar, where a larger statue of the Holy One stood. The bronze statue of the great Holy One, the Harbinger of Peace who had come to mankind long ago, stood up straight and rigid. His eyes of emeralds stared straight forward as if pierced with a green flame. In his right hand he held a staff at his side; his left hand, extended calmly with the elbow tucked at the waist, held a tin flame painted gold.

Every day, the Temple-Keeper would rise from his seat of contemplation on the edge of the bluff, where he performed his afternoon prayer looking out across the ocean. He would turn around, and would be directly facing the entrance to the Temple about thirty paces away. Then he would walk the straight line back to the Temple door, which had been paved into a little path. He would take the one step up and enter the open doorway of the Temple, and then he would process slowly straight down its middle to kneel at the foot of the Holy One. Whenever he re-entered the Temple in this procession, he felt like a distant wriggling particle returning into its fold, as the bee returns to the chamber of the flower to kiss its yellow bud. Every day the Temple-Keeper would kneel in front of the Holy One, lean forward, and kiss the golden bud of the statue’s flat navel. Then, after his worship, he would curl up to sleep at the Holy One’s feet, feeling safe and secure with this protector standing over him. In the morning, the light from the rising sun would shine in through the Temple door and wake him, and he would rise and proceed back out to the edge of the cliff to do homage to the sun and the sea and the morning.

Every day, the Temple-Keeper would emerge and sit cross-legged on the bluff and look out over the sea. The sea was his object of contemplation. The Brotherhood, when they had sent him to this outpost to keep the Temple, had told him that the sea was the Holy One and the Holy One was the sea, and that there he would ponder this great mystery and delve deeper and deeper into it. So he sat and watched the sea and listened to its chattering and mumbling and felt its changes, its pull and tug by the moon, its currents drifting this way and that. He came to know it intimately. Sometimes the sky and the sea would become a metallic gray, and the sea would be rough and choppy and he could hear it grinding on the rocks below him. Sometimes the sun would hang still in the sky and the sea would become perfectly blue and calm, one great flat surface that belied the mysterious depths underneath. And sometimes the sky would turn dark, almost black even during the day, and the sea would toss and heave as if massive battles were being fought in the deep, and the Temple-Keeper thought he could see the points of tridents jabbing up through the highest waves and hear the blowing of conch-shell horns amid the crashes of thunder and surf. At these times, the Temple-Keeper would try his best to remain in his spot and watch, because the storms too were part of the sea and could not be ignored. Sometimes, though, rain lashed his face and the wind threatened to pitch him off the cliff and the lightning flashed dangerously overhead, and the Temple-Keeper was forced to take refuge inside, huddling under the ever firm and steadfast statue of the Holy One, and his eternal offering of the comforting flame.

Many years went by in this way, and the Temple-Keeper, though still only a novice, kept up the daily ritual always with earnest devotion. He had been stationed at the Temple for many years—for as long as he could remember. The exact measure of time eluded him, for the repetition had turned his daily life into a still eternity, and the days all melded into one.

But as the years wore on, it seemed to the Temple-Keeper that the days of calm came less and less often, and more frequent were the days of choppy, unsettled gray sea, and the wild squalls came more often, too. Of course, he couldn’t be sure, for he kept no records; it might simply have been his imagination or the slatternly tricks of memory. At any rate, he grew more and more accustomed to the untamed sea and the storms; he stayed outside during them longer and more often, and he became as comfortable with them as he was with the sunny calm, for after all they were both faces of the same sea.

After a time, the Temple-Keeper found that he was no longer afraid. He could sit outside through the most merciless, raging storms and not be perturbed one bit. He no longer possessed any selfish concern for his own life or death; he only wanted to enter into the mighty ebb and flow of the Holy One, with all his heart, and end this tired commission. He became more and more impatient with his time spent inside the Temple and more and more eager to be outside and sit in communion with the sea and the sky and the gulls and even the trees behind him. Still, every day he did his duty without complaint, walking back into the Temple, performing the daily ritual, lighting the proper candles and bowls of incense in front of the various Honored Deities.

One day, after keeping the Temple for some twenty years—but it could have been forty, or eighty, for he could not say how long—he was sitting out upon the bluff and he felt a slight rumbling beneath him. The sky was gray and the surf was rough, but the waves were not abnormally large, so that the Temple-Keeper was surprised to feel such a rumbling beneath him. He got up and walked to the very edge of the cliff and looked down, but he could not see the point where the waves struck the rock, for the rock jutted out well over the water. It had been that way since he had arrived. Nor had he ever been able to see the point where the land met the waves from the side, for the cliffs extended for leagues in either direction, and there was no way to get down onto the beach. The Temple-Keeper returned to his place of contemplation, sat down, and closed his eyes.

A short time later he felt and heard the rumbling again. This time, with his eyes closed, he was able to hear it more attentively. He thought it sounded like a crash and an echo in a large, cavernous place. He opened his eyes and looked around him, slightly disquieted. The sea, the sky, the rock, all looked the same as they often had, yet he felt that something had changed, something had shifted, deep beneath him where all eyes failed to penetrate. He took a calming breath and stood up. It was time for the afternoon procession into the Temple, anyway.

He turned toward the façade of simple stone columns and felt a little rush of affection and gratitude toward the Temple for its solid, never-changing presence. He started his slow, deliberate walk toward it. As he was about halfway down the paved path, though, he felt a great rumbling, this time like an earthquake. The whole peninsula shook, and the Temple-Keeper almost lost his balance. He looked around anxiously for a second after it stopped, then proceeded more quickly into the Temple, forgetting decorum until he entered its hushed recesses. He took another calming breath, walked forward solemnly, and knelt down in front of the Holy One. As he leaned forward to kiss His Holy Navel, for whatever reason, a wave of forlorn sadness and nostalgia washed over him and made his body tremble. He kissed the Holy One’s navel tenderly and looked up into the emerald eyes that ceaselessly peered unseeingly ahead, into the horizon. Without knowing why, the Temple-Keeper felt as if he were saying goodbye to the guardian who had been so good to him.

Then the whole cliff of rock began shaking once again. The Temple-Keeper fell to the side and steadied himself  against a nearby column. A few of the painted icons fell off the walls and clanged on the ground like the clash of a dropped gong; some of the statues also fell over and shattered against the floor. Everything continued to shake. The Temple had not been built to endure such a riot of energy; its inflexible stone was too hard to cope with the shuddering waves that now passed through it. Cracks appeared in the walls, in the ceiling, in the floor. Lamps fell from their hangings and smashed, splashing hot oil across the floor. The Temple-Keeper looked around wildly in panic and prayed silently to the Holy One to protect his servant. But the blind statue, its legs bound rigidly together and its staff cemented uselessly at its side, could not stand the shaking, and it fell face forward; its nose shattered on the flagstones, and the arm that held out the gilded tongue of flame broke off at the elbow. The Temple-Keeper spun toward the door. But as he was crossing to it, a crack in the floor in front of him widened, and suddenly a piece of a flagstone dislodged itself and dropped away. The Temple-Keeper stepped forward and looked with astonishment down the hole. Through the floor and a thin layer of rock, he could see clear down to the sea surging a hundred feet beneath him.

All at once, the Temple-Keeper knew that it was over, and a strange calm seized him. He thought back over the last twenty years and understood what had been going on all along, what he himself had seen and heard and felt day after day without realizing the conclusion to which it all would lead. Day after day he had sat and felt the murmuring ripples washing against the rocky cliff, stealing away one grain of sand at a time like insinuating little comments and tiny disappointments; he had felt the waves crashing against the rock face below like the force of endless bellicose arguments, one after another after another; he had felt the surging power of the ocean during storms, pounding against the foundations below him with the undeniable force of law and reason. He had looked out across the ocean and seen how that whole, vast, infinite realm of thought and imagination, with all its watery roadways and eddies and undercurrents and vortexes and geysers, how all of that had been working on his lonely little bluff. Over all these years, while he had been unwearyingly and unceasingly performing his duty in the Brotherhood, the waters had been unwearyingly and unceasingly washing the land away from right under him. With this realization, and the realization that there was nothing he could do about it now and nothing he could have done about it—the realization that it had all happened as if by plan according to the Law of Nature, which is the Law of the Holy One—the Temple-Keeper felt the strange calm and let go of his anxious desire to save himself, as he had done in so many storms in the past. If he had hurried he probably could have scrambled out of the Temple and to the safety of the trees, but for what purpose? To return to the Brotherhood? They were the ones who had sent him out here, after all. How could they not have foreseen that this would happen? What excuse could they possibly give to him if he returned to them, shaken but alive? So he sat in the Temple that he had been told to keep, and let it pull him down. As he went, the thought crossed his mind that perhaps they had known all along—perhaps they had sent him out here for this very purpose. The Temple and the hollowed-out rock shelf slid and collapsed into the sea.

The Temple-Keeper was strangely at peace with his fate as his beloved Temple dragged him down, as the briny water flowed in around him, as he drowned. A huge slab of rock from the ceiling of the Temple fell down onto the Temple-Keeper’s chest and pinned him down; he felt the crumbling rocks beneath him shifting and sliding, carrying him with them further down the slope into the sea-depths. After a while, they stopped sliding and the Temple-Keeper came to a halt on the level bottom of the sea.

As the light of consciousness was fading to black, he felt weedy tendrils snare his arms and legs. They pulled him further down, out from under the slab of rock, and into the mucky ocean floor. He felt the scuttling appendages of sea creatures prancing over his legs, his stomach, his face. After passing through a squeezing black tube, something light, like a billow of wet silken hair, passed over him; a whisper in his ear spoke an unintelligible language, Weialala leia, wallala leialala. He found himself gently breathing again. His eyes were open. All around him was cloudy water suffused with blue and green lances of light, and several slim, floating shapes. He thought he could see their eyes laughing at him through the murky sea-green light, and then they tittered and fluttered away from him joyously. He spun and looked about him this way and that. Nothing held his body down now; his movements were unprecedentedly quick and free. He flapped upward toward the rippling silver surface with his tailfin and broke through, spraying droplets in an arc as he flipped his long hair back from his bare chest. The brown cassock had dissolved into the muck. He looked about in wonder; he was bobbing in a gentle surf a few dozen yards from shore. The rocky cliffs loomed up above him, a new face exposed where the bluff and the Temple had stood. The man flipped backwards into the water, diving deep, then looped back up and sprang out all the way into the air, falling back down with a splash. Then he dove up and down through the waves on a line out to sea, straight toward the late-afternoon sun.


-JMK

And what is so rare as an October day?
More lovely than any in June or in May
When a steel-gray cloud sunset lights up the sky
And the bright bursts of leaves so entrancingly fly
The wild homeless birds most eerily call
Wings beat overhead as they flee from the fall
And the cool piercing wind makes you know you're alive;
It's in the year's ceasing the spirit best thrives.
Keep your glad summer, and give me the tall

ghosts of dark oaks as they cross-cut the sky
weird whistling winds and the warm smell of pie
misty-gray mornings and brief bold afternoons
when the sky is sketched out in unquenchable blue

I choose not to flee, nor follow the wingéd,
Though their sound in my ears is so merrily singing,
Some can depart and seek summers to be;
I stay to the end, for the dead barren tree

Without cause, there can be no thing
Sans autumn there will be no spring
Sans love there's nought left but strife
Without death, there can be no life

Autumn's the last glorious gold of farewell
to a slow-fading year with more secrets to tell
(There are years that ask questions, and there are years that answer)
And some years do both, and neither.

Stars burn brighter in the chilling night
The autumn days are brief but tinged with light
And we?  We wonder what is wrong and right;
For a moment in autumn we feel it.

Now is the sunset of the year, more splendid for promise of ceasing.
Take June if you will, but leave me the fall, when the soft burnt-leaf fires burn clear and call all who would feast of life's fill as we draw near wintry night -

In this season where days are most fair,
There's no way mere June can compare.

-LC

Given the choice of whiskey or wine
I'd rather have wine (perhaps most of the time)
But the nights come along
(Oh, life is a song - isn't yours?)
When nothing but whiskey suffices.
On the rocks, if you please, with some ices.
Or from the flask of a boy
Whose blue eyes are a joy
And whose smile's as nice as pure nice is.
Oh, Jameson, please, with some ices.
And let's drink - just a drop - beyond where we should stop -
So our hearts will feel less odd in slices.
And we'll gamble those hearts like they're dices.
And we'll pack up our lives in those ices.
On a whiskey-type-night it feels almost right
To label our loves like cheap prices
(that one wasn't worth half the time that he took
            and she didn't live up to her nice looks)
As if hearts can be measured in scales.
And our lives are already-told tales.
Please cease the aged airs, like you've journeyed so far
This too is a stage, and you'll forget this bar,
And your dreams are not dead until you are.
So I'll pour one from the flask - I promise, my last -
In the back of my mind, as I drink it with ices,
I believe that I'll find (how that whiskey entices!)
           Inspiration
at the bottom
      of a
glass.

(And when I do, it's the nicest.)

-LC

You can't argue with blank space
(it has nothing and everything in it)
or ever catch it yielding place.
You can't argue with blank space.
With all to gain and nothing to face -
and only once to begin it -
You can't argue with blank space.
It has nothing and everything in it.




I'm really really hoping that the reluctance to post here was similar to not wanting to take the first piece of cake - so now that I've made the necessary faux pas, please share your creative endeavors!