Okay–here it is, the look is pretty much going to be this, though I’m trying to find a way to tweak the background colour so I can have dark green at the right and left sides as I did in the old template. And the sidebar needs work, too, but I’m done for the moment.

As soon as I can create a home page with links to different sections, clicking on ‘phoenixwolfray.com’ will no longer take you to the blog but to a single page. Just click on ‘blog’ in the header.

This is not all that interesting perhaps, to anybody but me, but I’m loving it–cleaning up my online house, renovating, redecorating–it feels great!

Don’t go away, I’ll start writing again soon, I promise.

As part of my reconfiguring process, I’ve updated the permalink structure. What this means is that the URLs of a specific post will now indicate the date and the title of the post instead of the old way which was pretty ugly (in fact it’s called in the industry ‘ugly permalinks’ ). This new way is known as ‘pretty permalinks’. I’m all for that.

This means that a post which was once found by the address http://phoenixwolfray.com/?p=388 can now be found by going to http://phoenixwolfray.com/2008/02/06/back-to-our-program-in-progress/

The new way is longer, but more informative; as you can see, it makes it easy to find old posts as long as you know the date, and it makes searching the archives infinitely simpler, especially since the post title shows in the URL.

And not to worry, the old links still function fine.

I’m in the process of updating the look and function of this site; rather than simply a writing & music blog, phoenixwolfray.com will become an umbrella and portal for my other web identities such as earthmatrix.net, word of mouth, myspace and who knows what all. So ‘Truth is a Crazy Poet’ will no longer be the title of the blog, sad to say. I was fond of that name, though it met with resistance from certain quarters (’crazy? why crazy?’). Off it goes, and the site will nakedly stand in my own name.

Stay tuned for further tweaks and changes!

So what do you think of the new masthead? I rather like it. A little more mysterious, less in-your-face.

Dark follows light, and light follows dark
The dark side is about to become the bright side
for revolution is the way of life
It’s time for the light to surrender supremacy,
to make way for that which hides in shadow
if that frightens you, ask why you fear
half of your own whole self. The bits on the shelf have
waited their turn so long they’ve forgotten
how to even yearn for their heart’s desire to manifest

If this is a test, I would know the penalty for failing
and even more, the reward for success
If I am to invest my desire on the side of survival,
I wish to know that survival means something
Beyond mere continuance of existence.
If I am to persist in this struggle to evolve,
To revolve my whole self, to show
my least comfortable faces for the gaze of
those hidden eyes in the haze, then
I insist upon some surety that my efforts
be not vain and fruitless. You see, I want to root here. 

So I ask, but would be frankly flabbergasted
to receive a useful answer. The point of asking is not
to be answered but to explore the question, to feel through
the maze to the best approach to discovering
and possibly uncovering solutions to the issue
that resulted in need to ask. 

So I ask, and to you (whoever you are)
I assign the task of not responding,
of allowing me the space and grace it takes
to flounder foolishly in my own confusions until some
magical fusion of fragmented perception
might culminate in the epiphany I seek. 

I do admit, I would not enjoy the view from
the seat I expect you to occupy.
I use you, poor reader, shamelessly
toward my own devices
In my defense, I can only present
the vision of wholeness which I struggle
with all my brain and heart to serve. 

Should this cup of blog be not to your liking,
allow me to mention the obvious, that any time
spent on studying these patterns of photons
randomly-etched in electronic sand must be
by your own command, for you are free
to wander and wonder at your will,
to quest for your own carrots, and to
invest your attention where you please. 

Should I seem defensive, please believe
it is not you, dear unknown, against
which I defend, but merely my same-old familiar,
ratchet, snick and click of guilt clacking
against the grain of my burdened, saggy brain,
close to collapse under the weight of old freight
passed from parent to child for the purpose of
trapping and taming the wild within. 

Those patterns and pathways were practiced
until I got it right, but always failed to delight
and in fact became root, branch and leaf of my plight

And now, the wild world, night side, feeds my need,
in wild mind I find my salvation

It’s time to delve into the deep layers now, below the surface tension that occupies so much of my attention these days. Time to dare to dig below the obvious patterns of love and betrayal. This tale told so often has become a coffin, and it always ends the same way, dangling on fraying rope-ends of hope and despair, a fantasy, doomed from its outset.

What is that sound; is it singing? Rejoice, for this dark tag-end of doomed dreams has a silver lining. It serves as an inspirer of beautiful music to awaken and uplift the larger heart that lives beyond the hope for a single human relationship.

Indeed, the feed we most need must come from a vaster source. No single love could stay this course, for we are each fractured into shards and fragments of what we once might have been, and we see our reflections in crazy bits of shattered mirror, some here, some there, some foul and some fair. I spy you and see myself, whoever you might be, and I name the reflections I approve of ‘something to do with me’ and the ones I dislike ‘nothing to do with me’, but all that means is, I don’t know the half of what I am.

It is time, I insist, for a cease and desist to this game of winners and losers in love. Why should some be shoved aside to make way for new images of self, when all visible images added up still total less than the sum of who and what we are? We are stars, vast with ancient, albeit ignored, glory. The true tragedy of human existence is its insistence on its own insignificance.

Alas, this approach is doomed to irony, for in our attempt to forestall our fall, we grovel in our group muck, sinking as low as we can go. “Don’t look at me,” we each whimper, imagining ourselves unique in our debased state. “I am nothing, no one, I have no purpose, life has no meaning. Look elsewhere, for I am particularly powerless!”

Pathetic creatures, we, worms wriggling helplessly in the mud of this tiny ball of rock and scum located inauspiciously in the backwater of a small spiral galaxy in the corner of a single universe among infinite possibilities. How could we imagine otherwise? How could we dare to vaunt ourselves as anything more?

Still, the question is begged, what have we to lose? Why must we so fear falling that we voluntarily cast ourselves into the depths? Why force ourselves to pretend to be content with pseudo-life as fragments and fictions, figments of our own self-negating imaginations?

Suppose for a moment we have already lost everything. Further, imagine that we have cast away our potential for no purpose, paid the maximum cost for no product but the twisted blessing of knowing we have nothing further to lose, nowhere further to fall. Imagining that is true, ought we continue to buy such tawdry, cowardly self-deceptions?

Suppose, for an instant, we are the spawn of gods with infinite power in potential, and imagine that we might actualize a fraction of the power we sense pulsing in our veins in moments of shocked sanity which we habitually dismiss as insane hubris and delusional vanity.

What if, perchance, actualization were a matter of allowing all that we are to emerge into consciousness, to know ourselves in all our glory, terror, rage, ecstasy, bliss, to burst in orgasmic explosions of expansion on ever deeper and wider levels. Would you risk it? Would you dare? Would I?

Oh, my. Back to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress.

Tripping lightly across the keys, I seek to dazzle with insights to brighten my day. Failing that, I seek at least to distract with interesting turns of phrase, tricksy poemizing of the crazy kind.

Blind is one thing, dazed and confused another, yet my mind is bruised and contused these days as the grey winter haze and drizzle frizzes my hair and sizzles my inspiration. What pounding thought bludgeons my brain, causing this pain? Oh how boring, it seems my true love story has come to a sordid end. Must friend become foe? Is this a test? To what end?

Call me blessed, for the one I loved still harbours warmth, though I have been displaced as the inspirer of his ardour. The hardening of the heartery is in me, for I cannot forgive, that overrated activity given such shrift by gifted largehearted souls purporting to show the rest of us how to become lighter than a feather and waft our way to heaven on waves of unconditional love. But what of we whiches who wish to tear the hair from our heads, to spit blazing balls of flame in bursts and spurts of spite?

The fruit which was ripening fell to earth untasted, and oh, I suppose it was not wasted, for such seeds might take root where they land instead of being excreted and flushed. Still, in my cold thwarted heart, the Cinderella story I inhabited exploded, dumped me without dignity back in the ashes of my lonely hearth. I wuz framed, set up for failure by some malevolent invisible entity. As divinely choreographed as our beginning seemed, so this end shows distinct signs of diabolic interference—’twas a plot, I say, designed to puncture my nascent faith in love.

And as this plot thickens and sickens my abandoned innards, left to fend for themselves with scraps of sugar, spice, and my daily bread, I am compelled to admit that the love wasn’t all that after all. So many needs went unmet, desires unfulfilled, wants unsatisfied, but I compromised for the sake of the parts that were being pleasured, smothered, sucking up mass quantities of deliciously sweet love. Hours spent in endless pointless verbal sparring and blather were considered well spent in exchange for other hours cuddling, snuggling, holding, stroking, sweetly sobbing and sighing in bliss.

My road ahead spreads wide without apparent direction; I must needs close my eyes to let my feet find their way. This results in aimless wanderings; I flounder, foundering on excess, shoving treat after treat down my gullet in gluttonous greed, seeking endlessly that which I cannot conceive even in imagination. The hungers which which went chronically unmet collide with those once sated but now thwarted, adding up to a gaping maw of rageful starvation which eats me from the inside and threatens to consume the world. Hurling imprecations and blame at he who abandoned me, I must face the fact: it was myself.