Akhilles 5

When it hits it will be louder than anything you have ever heard. Guitars making the sound of an elephant being butchered, my love song to the world. Flung to the wind with the hope that one day it will come back to me. Come back to me. Hideous and recurrent, it is the reptile history behind the eye of a red-tailed hawk searching out what is hidden beneath the reeds in the stream. It is the injury I share with my seven year old son. A cycle--It is nobody's fault. Adaptive behavioral patterns formed repeat themselves, it the reason my head sounds like a slaughterhouse. It is recurrent:

8 Physics- A recurring series of operations in which heat is imparted to or taken from a substance, as in gas or other internal combustion engines, which by expansion or contraction gives out or stores up energy and is finally returned to it's original condition.

The only way to go against the will of God is to go alone.
The shattered family is a song in and of itself.

The only true way to sing the loss of the exile is without you.
Without you. Without you every morning I march to war.

Champion

Pronunciation:

\ˈcham-pē-ən\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin campion-, campio, of West Germanic origin; akin to Old English cempa warrior

Date:

13th century

1: warrior, fighter
2: a militant advocate or defender (a champion of civil rights)
3: one that does battle for another's rights or honor (God will raise me up a champion--Sir Walter Scott)
4: a winner of first prize or first place in competition; also : one who shows marked superiority

--Merriam-Webster Online

Pilgrimage

Akhil IV

The sky in the river and the stones below. Proud kingfisher flashing. Achilles, erupting fire, walks down the center of the road. The quick talent of the killing hand. Wrath. Javelins. Quick water passing over black stones, black as iron, covered with orange algae like rust. Iron, thrust, to separate the shoulder from the neck. Geometry of broken torsos scattered like leaves before him, blood over sand, blood coursing through a holy armature. Arms sprung like wire, spear arcing it's radius, whistling and ruinous. His measured breathing. Achilles goes room to room. Throats opened blossoming like wild hyacinth. There are dragonflies skimming for meat over quick water, the gray-white skin of the sycamores flayed, there is the sky in the river and the stones below. Stone wet and translucent, look deep to witness the universe inside, the thin difference between god and monster.

Henry

turns seven monday.

Om

Akhil 3

I can run all night, I can do it alone. The chain, the pistons, the multiple mechanical confluences sing in their revolutions. I can burn all the gasoline out of the line and still run. I am impossible to behold. I have pain enough to share with everyone and everyone gets their turn. I am fast and fast and fast and no one will ever catch me.

Fig.3-Black Rhino

approx. 3'x4'

Akhilles II

Fell from Heaven without a brother. Hand open, falls upon the smoking six-lane wreck of morning. Achilles in love with the world, hand open to skim the wind, gets into position above the merge. Born from Gods of Acceleration, a spearhead bright and cruel and thrust into the sand. Hand closed, clasps the back of the neck of his brother, holds his brothers' head to his head. Rejoice. Blessed engineers drew perfect converging arcs in space, cambers and radii, filled them in with concrete and asphalt, gave them back to the people to die on. Achilles steaming on the overpass at night, preparing, praying to the God of Propulsion. Achilles head down, shoved into the wind. Hand open reaching to feel the impossible wind across the tops of trees. Hand closed with the hideousness of dragonflies. His hand is closed, mourning openly the loss of his brother. Admiring the noise and cruelty of the wind, in a summer of hawks and wind. Counting concrete barricades, scarred from metal and black from tires. Counting seven blue birds flashing, blue flashed open across their open backs.

Torn Up Again

Guide My Hand

Every morning for the better part of the month of May I read this prayer out loud in an attempt to memorize it:

God, I offer myself to thee--to build with me and to do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power, thy love, and thy way of life. May I do thy will always.

But couldn't get it to stick. At the same time I was working on the Grove job installing a series of countertops. The material, Paperstone, is heavy, harder than white oak, and very expensive. My saw blades and router bits were mostly dull if not completely shot and I was convinced that at any moment I was about to fuck up. So to compensate, before I made a cut , I'd say my own little prayer, "Please, guide my hand" and hope I'd cut a straight line. I have since applied this shorter one to most everything I've been doing lately.






~

Tonight, On the Phone

My father said to me "You know, sometimes, when you try to do the right thing by everybody else, you wind up sucking hind-tit."

I laughed out loud, "What was that you just said?"

"You never heard that before? See, there ain't a lot of milk comin out of the hind-tit."

Instrument

n 1. A means by which work is done; an implement or tool, especially a device or mechanism for scientific or professional purposes, as distinguished from an apparatus, tool, or mechanism for industrial use. 2. Any means of accomplishment; The hands are instruments of the will. 3. A mechanical or other contrivance for the production of musical sounds. 4. A person doing the will of another. 5. Law A formal document, as a contract, deed, etc. See synonyms under AGENT, RECORD, TOOL

--Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary

To the Wind

Thanksgiving- Atlanta- '93

St. Stephens

Found in a Notebook

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, the expression is unique.

And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it it; nor how valuable it is;

nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open.. no artist is pleased...

There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

--Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille