Not really.

I was listening to the radio today when I heard someone describe themselves as hyper-extrovert/hyper-introvert and I thought for a moment – “hey that’s me”. I immediately knew what he meant when he said this and was affirmed when he was described himself as the kind of guy who likes to go to parties and be around lots of people but prefers to go to movies alone.

It is no secret to anyone who knows me that I struggle to maintain “normal” relationship expectations. That is to say I tend to go through looooooong periods of relational invisibility followed by short bursts of relational connectedness (and to those who go say – “since you know this why don’t you change it?” I reply “because I like me this way and frankly one may as well as the leopard to change its spots).

I have always known this about myself to one degree or another but have never really heard anyone else describe themselves this way. Having been given a framework of language to work within it occurred to me today that someone I greatly admire was also wired a little like this. Andy Warhol.

Warhol was quite the character really. Enormously connected and influential in the NYC art, music and pop culture scene he was constantly around crowds of the who’s who of society in his era. At the same time he managed to be an incredibly private and isolated individual living at home with his mother until her death and then on his own afterward, rarely (if ever) having anyone over to his home he managed to divide up his world into those parts which were with people and those parts that were alone. His temperament suggested he preferred both but that isolation may have been the greater necessity. 

When he was with people it was generally to the service of his art and his image (which was arguably in service of his art too). When he was not with people it was in service of himself.

I feel this way often. Frankly I like people in crowds and busyness but rarely on their own one on one. It’s not that I dislike people on their own but I have a distinct preference if I am to be honest. It could be selfishness but then name me one human preference that is not selfish at its core.

This makes me challenging to relate to (understatement) and it makes me challenged to relate.

This post really is not going anywhere. It is not designed to be therapeutic or self-counselling – it just is what it is as I am who I am. I am encased in a hermetically sealed bubble in this world, observing, taking notes, offering interpretations but rarely getting close to anything or anyone. It can be a sterile existence that makes beauty that much more aching for the difficulty to obtain it. Everything is heightened to a degree in the way water must be to a thirsty man in the desert.

It is interesting how the lack of something can give one a much greater sense of this thing in comparison to one who has it in abundance. In this sense I appreciate my wiring.

if your
……………..poetry
is all about
form and font
it is not P O E T R Y
to those who cannot
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>see

if your wondrous woven words
are all about the rhythm and rhyme
all about the way we keep time
it is not poetry to those who cannot hear
it is not poetry to those who won’t draw near

if your ways of beauty
break ugly on the page
like art vomited forth
toward an accidental grace

maybe (just maybe)

you have something

strip
is to peel back;
it’s a revealing,
an apocalypse
that we might see
naked promise
laid out sumptuous
and bright before us
casting shadows
on all that has gone before

sometimes in my sleep
who I am dreams
of who I might have been
if not for those
who dreamt in their sleep
of who they might have been
if not for those
who dreamt in their sleep
of who they might have been…

even in the sightless places
there’s a way through the black
a way through the hand-less times
there’s always a way back
past the silent, past the empty chimes

keep beating on the path
you don’t need to seek the light
no need to find a way through
just wander, bleed, heal and fight
and that light’ll find you…

when the pen is sharp
it cuts deep to my quick
whet in the arterial flow
that I might spray words
across the world’s walls;
the macabre neon graffiti
of a man who dies again and again and again

there’s a cracked bell in Philadelphia
that sits un-rung (un-sung) for the people
i n s p i r a t i o n
where’s the passion in dead brass?
better a cracked singing voice
than lonely beauty
sitting solemnly in silence

i don’t want to interpret the shadows
that we see on the walls of our caves

i don’t want to listen to quiet voices
that ones a silent and dry throat craves

i want to cast those shadows sharp from the outer world
i want to be the voice heard above the crowd, crisp, unfurled
let my image be the icon that headlong into the masses is hurled

better to be the selfish one broken by many a grasping hand
then the prostrate beggar who forgets how tall to stand

i am sonar
sounding the depths for God
waiting silent in the dark
for the tell-tale return;
my voice echoes back to me
speaking not of nothingness in despair
but of far-off walls
and a dream of open gates

blindness is epidemic
but never base and black
not the dark we think we know
it’s a soft and sometime digital glow
it’s keyboards and desktops,
floors and streets and shoes;
blindness is the cast-down eye
that fails to look up and see
the miracle glow of incandescence,
of stars captured in glass

irony is this enslaved, enslaving light
this over-arching hiding from the bright
fueling the pressed down, bending back
working to be free from work
that we might create these beautiful tools
to ensure we would never stop and see