Perhaps less than solid

It is the third day of the month of national poetry writing, the 30 days of the year when the prolific nature of every poet is put to the test and heaven only knows what strung out bloodiness results. I would put myself to this test, spreading my lungs out over my ribs, no sound escaping with air, but with letters and rhythms struggling in the places between walking and thinking and typing and writing and keyboards. I would. I cannot. My imaginings are occupied on roads without names finding songs that tell stories about people who mean little to my responsibilities. They build cities and stories about cities and wonder at lives lived encrusted in the local magics. I guess that ought to be 'magicks.'

I have plundered my daydreams and found a jewel, something private and impossible to make fiction and real for these creatures rolling around in the muck of my still-forming stories. I do them disservice. They live and breathe and have names, and I have yet to find them places. There is little poetry solidifying itself in my life. All of the language is blood.

I have begun watching Simon Schama's The Power of Art. I had seen the Caravaggio episode, a friend of mine recorded it. I remember being thunderstruck at how meaningful the thing was when I saw it - how appropriate the timing of such overwhelming talent and ability and faith and that particular inability to see the morass of humanity as anything but sublime and fertile.

Now I am again struck at the peculiarly urban nature of certain art - the squalor and pageantry that walk the streets together, claiming the same spaces, the same roads and histories, though seen and told from perspectives so skewed as to be legitimately called alien. There is some magic, some mystery in the creation and maintenance of a city, a proper city, I mean, not just a large collection of people in tall residences. I mean a city, a living, breathing organism with a personality, creation story, art, food, smell, bureaucracy, music, trade, death, cancers and buds and patterns of traffic and chaos moving through every world created within its geography. There can be no city without a sense of expression. Reliance on trade as the defining characteristic of any urban area as a city reduces the human element to mechanization, something which is far too commonplace in this world, and has been throughout much of the history the world has seen fit to throw up in front of my eyes.

Why else would marble become flesh? Why bring Jesus to earth and give pilgrims dirty feet? Why find satisfaction showing mortal beings that no wealth, pomp or decree can prevent the beauty of Death its due? The city is a place that can live on the illusion of immortality, after all, the buildings will outlive us, perhaps we can outlive ourselves, skip the tradition of social construct, we'll just not acknowledge the right of Death. Rural life does not allow such illusions, a claim I do not make in the spirit of romance or idealism. Nature is a pragmatic lady, and Death is her triumph.

But we will insist that we see what we wish, will we not? We will see Nature as Fury, as Benevolent, as a Bitch. We will see the city as proof against Death, as the City of God(s), as the ultimate expression of our human capabilities.

I like to think of cities as the ultimate version of Voltron, made of the collected abilities and presences of every inhabitant, ready to establish that I Am Here. Problem with that is the rest of that statement: Best Not Fuck With Me. Bit defensive, bit challenging, bit headed towards disaster, that.

These thoughts are still shadowy, but I could not pretend that they were not there, could not go forward without finding them some sort of solid ground whereon to find their feet. It is a complicated thing, this world that builds itself from the patterns and details of the planet that is my home. I am in no hurry to define it for itself, the job is already done.