Working on the Novel

(photo by Ras Jiro)

I’ve been writing poetry for 3-12 hours a day for the last week and a half. Sometimes working on a novel. Sometimes just working. Not always for myself. Sometimes behind a typewriter in the plaza and getting paid. Other times at home and in the backyard at my writer’s desk and drinking tea.

When I’m in the middle of writing the novel, I fill with envy for my future self who can say he is almost done and has less to write than he has written. Sometimes my head spins with how much I have left to write. Other times my head spins with all of the other novels I have left to start writing.

When I’m in the street, my mind taps into something outside of myself and I see the words typed in front of me come out cleaner and clearer each day, giving me this sense of pride for the poems people walk away with.

When I’m at home, I’m filled with this desire to share with someone what I’m writing. To just have it done and published already.

Sometimes I wonder how Kerouac did it. I wonder how Miller did it. I wonder how Thompson did it. No one ever taught me how to do any of this. I feel like I’m past the point of making it up for myself, and almost at the point of finding the things that actually work.

Today I bought 4 poems worth of groceries. It’s enough for the week. I’ve been thinking about upping the rate I suggest. People really value spontaneous poetry. I see the romance it inspires. I see the hope it gives. I feel first hand the connections to the earth it creates. I’ve written birthday poems to people’s grandmothers. I’ve written love poems to people’s wives. I’ve written surrealist poems to old beatniks who tell me about the time they saw Gary Snyder walking a purple poodle. One guy asked me to write a poem to his enemy and I wrote an apology. None of this can be translated to dollar signs.

Someone has been leaving pennies underneath the rosebush where I write in downtown Taos. The first time I thought it was odd enough. The penny was old and dirty. It looked like it had been sitting there for a while. But I’m there 3 to 4 days a week, so I would’ve noticed it before. Oddly, this was the first or second penny I’ve found in months.

The second and third time, the pennies were even older and dirtier, as if they had sprouted from the ground and were young seedlings. And there were more of them. 

They weren’t there when I first sat down.

I found the pennies after writing a poem that really struck a chord. A poem about heart consciousness. A poem about spreading abundance.

Perhaps the rosebush has been tipping me. 

I believe in magnetism. I believe in abundance. I feel absolute gratitude. I wish there was more time in the day. I wish I had more energy. I wish my focus was stronger. I wish I had the words to describe everything I dream.

Some days I realize this is the life I lead. I realize it is leading to something greater. I realize if this is all I have at the end of it, I’m okay with that.

My words continue to give smiles. These smiles continue to give me what I need to continue. 

My dream is to finish writing these stories I’ve lived, so that I can again be an open slate and experience new ones. Until then, I write endlessly.

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My books now available in Denver, CO

DENVER, copies of my books Travel By Haiku and Fire. Sun. Salutation. are now available from Kilgore Books and Mutiny Information Cafe. Stop by and support these local communities! You won’t be disappointed.

Not in Denver? Try the links below to find a location near you where you can grab one of my books and help out a local bookstore. You can also read excerpts, see live performances, and read reviews at the following links

Fire. Sun. Salutation. –>  http://bit.ly/FireSunSalutation

Travel By Haiku –>  http://bit.ly/TravelByHaiku

A-Politico Absurdia

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A few days ago, I stopped by the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. The campus was pretty quiet and at first look, everything was a little too typical of a college campus. 

But then tiny blips of magic began to pop out to me: a stencil of Allen Ginsburg spray painted on the library drop off box, a sculpture of Kali hiding on the windowsill of the administration building, a geodesic dome greenhouse, a tattered poem about oneness with environment hanging from a willow tree. The students left offerings to the spirits and fairies of the Colorado wilderness. Their administration seemingly encourages this.

Under a giant sycamore, I found this little fairy altar. A small box with a poem about Hologram Reality on its roof, sheltering a little metallic angel and a giant quartz crystal. It felt more than appropriate to leave a copy of A-Politco Absurdia behind in this tiny fairy home for someone else to find.

A-Politico Absurdia is a manifesto written by Jozef Maguire and myself about the coming dream punk rêvelution of consciousness. It was released earlier this year, and took the last 5 years to assemble into its current dream-inspiring form. 

You can read more about it and download a digital copy here: http://bit.ly/APoliticoAbsurdia

Tapping Into Ancestry

​In Ireland, I better understand how Irish I am. My Irish roots grow outwards. Stemming from the abundant ground. The green earth full of magic. My ancestors buried in the dirt still tripping out on ancient magic mushrooms.

There’s something about the way of storytelling here. These folks are wide-eyed dreamers with an appreciation for the Bardic tradition. It’s beyond magical realism. These folks still see faeries and forest elves. They hear the songs of their elders coming in the wind or down the ripples of a stream. In Brú na Bóinne, there was this thing that was marked “phallic stone” in its glass case, but I swear I saw an actual unicorn horn. And I wasn’t the only one.

Back in the US, I find myself becoming really attracted to indigineous tribes. I appreciate the stories of the Coyote. Tales of the Crow. Sacred animals. Sacred world. In the US, that’s more and more the only culture I can relate to. 

But here, in Ireland, I’m surrounded by my tribe. There’s plenty of Kavanaghs. Murphys too. I find my family names in all of the graveyards. I find them in memoriams for the Irish Revolution. I find them on the rectory walls of medieval churches. They’ve been living and dying here for millenia.

Except for the later Christian influence, these tribes are not that much different from the Lakota or the Navajo. There’s plenty of old spirits swimming around in all that green. Pagans running around shirtless. Painted faces, gobbling psychedelics. Really seeing the world around them. Really understanding it. Having an oral tradition. Here the Crow only have an Irish accent, but they still fly west with the sun, usually leading to some sort of doorway or secret portal to the netherworld. Here the Deer still come out to greet a humble traveler and point them towards safe shelter.

At home, I ride my bike around and sing to myself unconsciously. Not words, but sounds. Usually, I think I’m scatting like Fela Kuti. But here that’s called lilting and it’s existed as long as the Celts had instruments. A mixture of beatboxing and mimicking instrumentation. Even the drums have pitch shifts with taught skins. I’ve already stumbled upon a native drum circle. It wasn’t a hippy sort of gathering. More of a session at a pub, with dancers and other musicians.

Back home, I’ve often felt strange. I’ve often found my imagination feeling oppressed or otherwise derided. Maybe the English rule, repelled from Ireland, moved onto the Americas. There’s so many visible signs here of England’s attempts to strip these “savages” of their mysticism. It reminds me of many of my much more petty experiences, of folks, who just can’t see beyond the 2D world they’re trapped in, and their responses to my being far out in my perceptions.

The older I’ve gotten and the farther out I’ve gone, the more I’ve let my practical senses go. Having sense is not sensual. Everything out here is nonsensical. 

Too many folks busy themselves with being proper. And I’m just not wired that way. And now I see from where it stems. Even my superstitions. Or my inner revolts toward a square-ordered world. They’re not just mine, they’re in my heritage.

I lay my stones atop a rock of swirls to charge in the sunset. I meditate on the green hill and close my eyes looking inward. I become one with these savages. They are my brethren. In the dark, I begin to see the night, and realize it was always this way, even in the daytime. The Dreamer is always awake. Only boring people not of this separate plane would try to tell the Dreamer that he’s only sleeping. Only they would be ignorant to the true boundlessness of reality. 
The Sleepers recklessly sleeping and not learning to dream.

Those types of folks live here in Ireland, as well. But so far, as far as I can tell…there are less of them.