K.B. Nelson's Blog: Speculative Fiction-Unbound Imagination, page 2

word known by touch

All the time
I want to write with light,
the way a winter sun can send tendrils
along the fern-spine and drip,
luminous
onto moss-hair and stone.
But the truth is, I also like the shadows,
the dark lines of the bark,
the crack in the shell,
the point in the water where
everything fades into mystery.
This is the season of the womb,
where words are known more by touch
and the candle-light
makes me sigh in wonder
as it glows in velvet darkness.

KBN

yes

I don’t care if you pray to Jesus,
sit in meditation before Quan-Yin,
dance a wild spinning ecstasy around
the still center of your Sheik.

I don’t care if you wear a pentacle
or hold up the latest scientific journal,
keep every kosher law
or run naked in the dirty and crowded streets.

I don’t care if you wave a fan over a sacred book,
bow five times a day to Mecca
show up to sing every Wednesday with the choir,
or chant from the Lotus Sutra.

Show me that you have something that,
when everything is taken from you,
when everyone has left you,
when even the sun pales and the oceans run
black and sickly,
the food is gone and the body stringy as rope,
drawing that last, terrible perfect breath,
you will still be able to say,
Yes.

KBN

Breath

My sweet friends,
be careful with your breath.

If the mind is filled with universes
and the smallest microbe,
can you doubt the force of all of that
lasering into speech?

One in-breath is still Alaha Ruha,
The Spirit;
with the out-breath that speech rides,
the smallness of ourselves tags along
with the excesses our body no longer needs.

The out-breath is one of our kidneys,
really.

Even that shaky recognition about what is
in
and
out,
has started wars.

I like the startled surprise of the in-breath—
a prayer all its own.
The choice of the out-breath’s message,
well...
that I must leave to your
loving
discernment.

KBN

Religio

Bind me back to a time,
when religion was not
another word for psychology;
when the shaman’s journey
or the Christmas Mass
told the story of relationship,
illuminated the ties that bound
life to life to
Mystery.

We work too hard now-
what does my life mean?
How does the past haunt today?
Who are all these voices clamoring inside?
I wonder—
why not invite it all in and serve tea?
And afterwards, gently,
walk the line between earth and water and sky,
hum a hymn from childhood,
and recall
not one of us arose from independent nothingness.
Reweave yourself, but intuitively,
in the meal served,
in the hat knitted and passed on,
in the laughter at the grocery check-out line.
If sin is simply all that is “unripe”,
then explode with flavor, with juice,
or if it is time,
with a fearless releasing to earth.
Live interwoven with it all,
and tell me
where then can you really fall?

KBN

Horses and Hospitals

Of Horses and Hospitals

Mechanical bed,
pastel blanket,
five tubes,
FIVE, I counted several times,
falling asleep sometimes between
three and four,
and a clock that didn’t seem to understand
how time works--
it rhythmically destroyed one-thousand-one
to skip or
slide to a sticky halt.
I expected, prayer beads sliding between my
weak fingertips,
a sense of angels,
a rescue by blue glow or maybe
at least
powerful, thrilling insight...
but no...
only the feel of a muzzle against my hand,
long whiskers tipped with ice,
the nicker of recognition,
fuzzy-coated, mud spattered,
and the smell!
Hay and earth warmth.
Perhaps at thin places,
all our intellectual practices must bow
before the real heaven
our animal bodies once found,
and carry stubbornly in our bones.

KBN

autumn

Sept 11, 2013



Picked ripe plums yesterday,

and the last of the blueberries,

wove the final passes of a prayer shawl,

said goodbye to a friend for six weeks—

she is chasing the sun,

while I wait for the clouds and rain.

Ninety degrees today,

but the light slants golden

right after dinner now,

and the bird calls grow hoarse.

The foghorns, too, cry out over the water,

giving voice to that itchy place where

warm dampness and cold collide,

twisting up summer wraiths,

on their way to becoming something else,

rain-dancing

among the tree-tops.





KBN

Coloring with words

September 3


Coloring

What happens when the words finally
stop,
and coloring to music seems enough--
oh, adult coloring for sure,
rich Arabic motifs or Celtic knots,
blues and greens and lightest yellows.
I dream of papering an entire wall,
living inside a mosque like
the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

But coloring isn’t inlaid tile after all,
just swipes from a plastic marker
so I grin at such grandiose plans
for my kindergarten exercise.

The words? Well, they always seem to
come back,
if only to make meaning
colorful.

KBN

writing life

August 23, 2013

Writing Life

My books climb up the wall,
over seven feet above my head,
(ground zero in an earthquake I’m thinking—
death by falling books fits me perfectly).
My office is so small that two butts wouldn’t fit side by side.
But when I write, I turn my head to the thin window,
and gaze out on a fiberglass St. Francis
and a vast, old cedar tree.

That’s enough of a view, really.

And music? Conan, Battlestar Galactica, the Eagle,
rousing soundtracks because
I don’t do caffeine that much, just mainline the audio
like a kind of shaman drum high.

I like this little womb-room, though.
I am the anchoress of our house,
hearing Ian skyping with someone in Japan,
listening to Steve describe database design
to an actual rocket scientist
while I swim with a favorite character of mine
in an underground plant sanctuary
on a planet grown
gray and dead.

It’s all just words, ephemeral, but
always, I am a kind of nun,
devoted to such mysteries,
raising my eyes to all those impossible books
and choosing to
write
life.

KBN

Symphonic

August 14, 2013

Symphonic

So many words float,
symphonic—
I see the world through them,
all the different ways I can say “green”.

A new Buddhist once said,
“Oh, a writer of fiction, you’re really lost.”

Maybe.

But then,
she’s never held a novel character’s hand,
cold-fingered after falling in a mountain creek,
ran her thumb over his broken nails,
and looked into eyes the same gray as ice,
depthless.

When such a one as this speaks,
I listen,
because he will have words
that are beyond this little conception
of
me.

KBN

emotions and mechanical hesitation

"The energy of hesitation he showed me was painful. There is no other word for it. Like so many data streams converged in too tight a spot and no one logic center could sort through the permutations of it all. But the dam wasn’t created by pure data—it was created by his reaction to it, and not only his reaction, but the myriad voices of others in his own mind.
-E"


E, or Eric, is a machine poised to bring full emotional responses alive in his kind. Through-out the story Folds of the Script, he evaluates the impact of emotions on not just the functionality of his race, but on how the human mind itself is helped or hindered.

This has been such an interesting project because Eric is really only known by the reader through the chapter headings like above, at least until the very end of the story. It has taught me so much about how relationship is built--beyond the frames of time, place, gender, even physicality. That theme of relationship, what is meant by the term "human", what is the nature of love, permeates so much of my work. It's the juice that I look forward to each morning.

KBN