An Apology

While I don't plan on giving a personal account of my actions to the site at large, I do feel it's important I give one here - as I feel guilty for having left so abruptly, without consideration as to how my departure could affect the group I worked to shape.

Contrary to some of the speculations I've seen fly around (including the idea that it involved a laughable group of adolescent-minded malcontents - LOL), I left under my own steam - something akin to being overwhelmed by my involvement in the site over the last year, in a drastic move to extricate myself, however breifly from it, and re-evaluate myself.

I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say: I'm glad to be back on my internet home, playing games with my friends... and I owe something more to the group I made.

I feel like an ass for leaving in the night like that, without a thought to the fact that it might steal all the threads I'd set up. That was wrong. In the very least I should've appointed new admins in my absence (as I'd planed to do with Writch anyhow), and thankfully LOB and I talked over MSN and I was able to explain most everything to her and convey my wishes.

Now - I don't mean to step on any toes or what have you. I just wanted to say sorry and hello - and that I wrote a few poems while I was away that I'd like to share with the group, y'know?

I hope no one is mad at me, and that you'll have me back as your friend and fellow member.

I don't think there's a need for apology or explanation. Most of us respect your work here and ALL of us understand that online communities can tie up an extraordinary amount of time (my darling wife will confirm this :)

Groups have a life of their own and go on living even if you cut their heads off. They might be a little jerky but a new head eventually grows to replace the old one. And the cycle continues.

If THIS group was weak, it would wither without leadership. Thankfully (and due to the strong foundation that you built and members who are terrific contributors), we are not a weak group. We are passionate about what we do and express ourselves in myriad ways.

Inovation comes from creativity (which we have in spades) and inovation evolves to fit the needs of survival. So here we are.

Your brief absense was a good mutation for the virtual organism that is US. Your sabatical created a lot of posts, galvanized participation, and opened a few doors.

Almost as if you PLANNED it that way. (hmmmm)

Glad you're back. Give us a little warning next time.

Cap

As one might expect with poets and writers; this group contains some of the most intelligent, sensitive, perceptive and clever members of this website. It couldn't be any other way than as Cap just described.

we are not a weak group. We are passionate about what we do and express ourselves in myriad ways.

This is so absolutely the case. Writers are the whole deal as minds go - both observant/perceptive as well as willful and descriptive.

Let me just say I'm glad to be back amongst friends. We're a unique group on this site - one that doesn't center around the whole vote chess/ team game aspect of groups, but on another kinship, that we share our love of verse and prose and the written word, we who happen to also conglomerate here as chess players. Some very profound people are currently in our membership, and while I may've been the guy who initially typed in the title, the roster makes up the soul, and I'm just happy to count myself in your company.

I'm going to bust a poem below - it might border on something of a rant and it has nothing at all to do with what's gone on, it was just one of my mystical ramblings I scribed while away...

There will come these times
when you're brought into a careful confrontation
with the implicite, sacral, fatality intrinsic behind
(peering through babies and corpses)
at all times, heavy with patient inevitability,
this magic waltz toward and away from the golden core,
hive-home-womb-honey-comb of being, slipping from
laziness into reduced views, accepting the degraded,
shadow-after-echo as the end of actuality instead of
raising the celestial chalice in a transcendant toast to the
implied perfection only blessed vision glimpses, the symphonic harmony
of that chorus; this is important - never confuse the correct instinct
to relax and reflect with the urge to exalt the slob in yourself and excuse
a fetid perspective with the flimsiest of antintellectual protests;
some spend all their anxious action in gossip and judgement and elaborate
excuses crafted to reinforce an attitude of crude depth and crass analysis,
which culminates in a tawdry display of the metaphysical limits that lay,
like manifest ligaments, across the body-psyche-soul. This cannot
be stated more directly: you must cultivate the context-soil-receptivity
of your latent posibility - in the last analysis you become what you are -
you sit in the sphere that the buoyancy of your awareness settles to.
Would that you would ask for more. The entire landscape is your servant,
offering its body for autopsy upon the medical table of your inquiry;
you - theorizing the cause of death rather than assessing the legacy of living -
ill abstracts, resting at the scale of their capability, the way they employ
their remenant sentiment like a shield. Remember- few suspect
that awareness can be cultivated like this - magnified, clarified,
more elaborately contextualized; do you realize how we resist this
violent codification of flashing insight? This... calcification of aesthetic lust?

Were I to tell you that sapphire novas escaped your notice.

It is holy exposure when beings are coaxed out of their shells,
disclose their essences unabashadly. How nascent and innocent
their secret entreaty - silly how they assume their desire isn't evidenct,
or aspiration obvious, still; I can say it 1000 ways, no closer
for the inferred figurations...

The intersections are rare,
when the gateways face you,
the whole cosmos hoping you suspect
the precise species of its convergence...

My sentences act as anchors in your expansion.

~

I hope some of you read through that in full. I think it's strong.
Let me say once more that I am glad I'm back amidst you.

Rael, first off, welcome back. This piece thinly veils some some of the Herculean struggle with Life Priorities and Perspective you went through on your 'sabbatical' as we liked to call it.

And yes, it is strong. Maybe a little too strong? It's distilled quintessence like port, when wine would be fine. Humor me before jumping all over me...

I think for the casual reader (of which I'm not sure that is the intended audience anyway) the language is rather stilted considering there is some anti-intellectualism going on in there, as well as some admonitions targeted at those who choose not to improve themselves - to expand. So it may counter productive in that aspect.

One solution I thought of is breaking up the lines a little. When I read a poem, I consider each line a 'spoonful' and those are some rather hefty mouthfuls. But I know this is empty advice - I myself ache over every word choice, sometimes taking 15 minutes or more for each) and I can tell that you do too.

Also I really believe this is two poems joined at the hip like Siamese twins. That is, there's a point (about the line "Were I to tell you that sapphire novas escaped your notice.") where it switches from a rumination (of extracting one's self from the petty) to an exaltation (to that which would deliver you from the pettiness). That's an inward meditation flipped over to outward invocation or veneration. To use a crude analogy: you're tooling down the highway and throwing the car into reverse without first slowing down to stop; you can drop a transmission.

I'll probably retract these statement after re-reading a few times. But there it is.

Welcome back.

On the other hand (on more of a Left-handed Path than Right-hand path in Sapphire Novas)...

I just love Omega Reigns in your (New & Improved!) profile. The juxtaposed dichotomies are delectable! There is not a word out-of-place and... and... well, just too much terrific in there. My favorites:

• coded organs unravel against the cipher of your observation
• to memorize doubt
• joke with no punchline

Yes! Who indeed knows?
"Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know."

Rael, I am glad you are back.