Nielsen's Nook

Lent is a time to receive

2011-03-10T15:48:00.000-06:00

Instead of trying to starve oneself during Lent, why not do something dramatic like read the entire book of Psalms in 40 days. If you start today, you can finish before Easter reading only 3-5 psalms a day.

If you like to mark things off you can use this calendar I made for myself.

Thin Sense

2011-02-05T19:27:00.001-06:00

Hackneyed gales now banter fragility
Of the sort not intended or contrived
But is beaten out flat, malleable;
A lamenting leaf, winded then rived
It gropes, gasps, falters to obscurity.

Shall we applaud its seeming stamina?
Or flee the face of such brutality
Whose stiffened fingers smother the sublime?
Barkeep! Sedate my conscience by whiskey
To shake my lamentable lamina.

Of what peace, flimsily contrived, stand I?
Soiled streams lash upon this florid face,
Thickly descending to realms rawboned
Where flesh limps low into sagging disgrace
In a senseless sepulcher to lie.

Great Expectations

2010-10-26T16:57:00.001-05:00

I'm deciding to finally be the useless me. Some might call it a mid-life crisis. I guess it is if one understands crisis as the ancient Greeks did, as a moment of decision. So I'm reinventing myself.

This blog is dedicated to the useless which is anything but unprofitable. Art and beauty are to be beheld and refuse to become the tools of any. They are ends in themselves and only the means of our beatification.

I've finally turned my time and energy to writing fiction which is of course totally useless. I'm finally doing something I have never been able to not do and it feels really good.

In the coming months, I hope to engage with others who are writers. I hope share some of the insights I've learned along the way. I hope to enjoy beauty a little bit more.

Fingers

2010-07-05T21:03:00.000-05:00

Finally. It’s come – the day of my death.
I’ve longed for it in listless doom;
Now, it’s arrived short of breath
And I’m unsure if I’d leave so soon.

Some are afraid of her square toes;
Others take pills to escape her notice.
Her stench of contradiction never leaves my nose.
The pills, the prayers, and poetry ring, hollow, helpless.

Life, this pointless mix of exploitation –
Fairy one, substance none.
Her silence rolls dark upon the dawn,
A pawn, pinched tightly in finger-length seduction.

A companion, not friend, she bleeds my brain,
Abhorring most the quick and the painless.
She plays, toys and shackles away everything sane,
That all and only heard is her dirge-like hiss.

What then? I do not know but to wait.
With finger-length saber she cuts with serrated bliss.
Life hemorrhages in an aimless bloody gait.
Heart and soul but two fingers of a cold, clenched fist.

The Other

2009-12-13T11:00:00.001-06:00

The Other echoes filling full the hall,
Expanding, consuming, lifting beyond.
Melodious mixture in swollen drops fall;
Buoyant waters raising the moribund.

Breathless beauty, singular, weighty, thick
Mingles with the shadows, dances on light.
Clarion harmony exudes to wick
Us from ourselves, an undivided rite.

Upon the water’s wave in given flood,
In transubstantiated bond, that we
Infused, indistinguishable in Blood,
May resound Eucharistic melody.

Petal of the Transcendent

2008-01-07T07:36:00.000-06:00

Rancid fumes circumscribe olfactory nerves
Tatooing their suffocating vapor through to depths unknown.

Roses, to behold now foul,
Seem to the eye what the nose
May no longer blissfully inhale.

As jagged lightning streaks in angular despair,
The mind races, ragged, down mnemonic corridors
That Hope, more fragrant still, would bud anew,
Unwriting these wretched runes with
The subtle petal of the Transcendent.

Conundrum

2004-02-04T11:04:00.000-06:00

There is a fog rolling in from the south
It comes in from the warm seductive waters of the sea
It lays low across the concrete and the grass
All that has been built, becomes no more.

The stream rolls softly across the rocks
A gentle reed drinks deeply of the secrets
Which rumble in tumbling parts of the waters by:
A flood is coming.

The conundrum beats boldly through the air
An iterative booming doom of syncopated heaviness
The earth grows loose around the roots
As if itself to groan in fear, her lungs impotent and empty.

The water rushes towards panic’s pace
As if to evacuate the riverbed.
In envy the reed shudders, his head bobbing in the wind
O to be a bird and fly, or a beast and hide!

A reed may flee upon consequence of death
His roots slip in helpless agony
To remain is not a self-determined choice
With a slick snap he is submerged,

Rushing towards a hope downstream
When the fog is pierced through, lifting its dense shroud
And a caretaker might restore him, warm and right
To the shore of the river once again.