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The Dao of Woodworking

by Charles Dalton Telschow

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1.
I want to release a book of my poetry, but I am pretty sure it would just be a bunch of love poems I've written to my respective exes, poems about how I hate myself, and ones where I swear I don't. That's actually not a bad title. Sure better than those ones that try to incorporate zen philosophy and a fucking table saw together. She noticed my veins and how I don't like to articulate anything I haven't written down. The chance I might actually say something I mean instead of scripting carnivals for the crowd, has me shaking.  I fucking hate clowns. And how everything has to be a joke.  Nihilism tests your sense of humor and your will to live, do you have the strength to laugh at this mortal coil? Point and mock at it's might, how else do we survive this? We don't.  Not for long anyway.  So don't trivialize that old stack of dusty poems covered in rose thorns and liquor stains. That scribbled saga is your life like it or not She showed me a poem she had written about me, after showing her a poem I'd written about her.  We both got really sad, but we both said thank you.  I'm learning to accept my crinkled story as gospel. Done trying to iron out pages already written this happened and there is still more to come. An ellipsis of existence (...) a Great Perhaps a blank check of potential, a BIG HEAPING pile of (…) maybe. All I have besides that is smoke clouds and broken glass, wood splinters and morning breath. So I could use all the help that I can get These days, my bones sound like creaking tree branches holding up a tire swing heart, do you remember how it looked that summer when we were kids?  Now, it's weathered and splitting and the inside is working it's way out and that tree is dying because no one waters it anymore.  I just weave my branches through strings of steel now, shaking the dust off melodic knots of flesh and sound, I am these dusty pages. I am the dust, and the ink upon them. That frayed tire, and that withered tree. The hum, and the silence. The loneliness, and the feeling of it.
2.
Hope 03:12
Ah, Hope, tell them where you are going. Hitchhiking down haunted highways smoking in rest stop bathrooms just for the chance of having company. Will you lie and say you’re ok with this that you won’t tell a soul? I know you made yourself, gather up your white sheets stained with what you sacrificed and drowned them in kerosene denying their flag of truce, you sent them out of this world as a beacon. I have seen your reflection dead on the ground in brothels and in the hallways of high schools where people smile at suicide I won’t let you be like that. You deserve to rest in wildflowers and Christmas morning smiles and between the lips of a couples’ first kiss. Hope, I can barely remember you, because you were long gone by the time I learned what family truly was, but I carry glimpses of you capriciously nipping at my heels as we lolligagged in meadows overgrown with all of our yesterdays. It seems as if you had brown hair, and a smile that made wallets feel worthless. And constellation freckles that were a simple type of beautiful. With a white silky sundress that could illuminate exactly just whats wrong with growing old, tell me, Is it true that when you picked flowers, they bloomed brighter? You see, I’ve found only death when I try to carry the beauty with me. When you were young, did you ever stop and think of the tribunal for your soul that was already being undertaken, by the ones who claim to have your best intentions at heart? Or did you wander on, and make flower whisper wishes to the sky, staring back into clouds and rainfall kisses? When you saw your first marching curb stompers, did you imagine the trend would catch on? Did you feel them unlock your ribcage, and treat your heart like an orphaned bird with clipped wings, did your stomach sink when they threw it down the well of gas and sulphur claiming to be the American dream? I wonder how heavy your diary must be, with the tears of the sea stained into the pages, you shouldn’t have to lift oceans when you want to feel honest. Do the voices of past mistakes ever give you a headache? Or will the cheap swill you found in the back cabinets behind a pair of dusty, never before used baby shoes help drown them out enough, so you can keep on living in the peripherals of shadows?  In the end while you stand at crossroads making deals with ground dwellers and dusty corners, I know I must leave you here for there is an evaporated ocean out there where I will put my roots, salty with the sweat and tears of backroads and overpasses, and I won’t bear the sight of you breathing in toxic disloyalty when I tried so hard to save you from the wolves who feast upon fallen stars, you fell so far. 
3.
I don't know why I'm so uncomfortable with the quiet.  Silence is just a musicians canvas, but I can't stop painting stuttering syncopation, I'm letting the bones in my hand curl, these poems are becoming gnarled and dusty.  I'm a broken record that only plays sad songs backwards, overanalyze until the vinyl breaks, Crush what's left into a powder and snort my insecurities, get high off my low self esteem and loneliness,  art is just harnessed insanity.  Hogtying the hurricane onto a page, catching smoke in a jar of sound, painting the emptiness perfectly We're all just really ok at not being ok.  I think the biggest fear for me is when I find peace, I'll lose my insanity.  Ego death is necessary for nirvana, but save your self death for the day you die. Do not walk around quiet gray and accepting.  Live colorful and confused. Live so loud that the silence no longer can strangle you. Chorus with the quiet until you hear the universe hum.  Even if it's all by yourself.
4.
Everyone's afraid of the lonely  It holds me tighter than you ever did.  I'm starting to talk to it.  I'm realizing we have a lot in common.  We both forgo words and instead just grip each other tighter like starving birds as the shadows slowly creep across the floor It's like holding a mirror against your chest for company until it b r e a k s . I hold the loneliness tight because maybe that's all it really wants at the end of the day, too. I quit cigarettes only to get addicted to a woman, now I'm withdrawing from her smile. Sweating her laughter out, washing away the warmth she left behind.  I don't look at mirrors anymore. The joke is growing old.  The joke is getting pale and hasn't eaten lately. It smokes too much weed and still hasn’t finished that album he keeps saying he is going to write. It's laugh is turning into a whimpering cackle, it dreams of not dreaming at all, tie a knot in the punchline and hang myself with it,  I know the only truly unbreakable laws of this world are death and g r a v i t y but dammit if I ain't a rebel who wants to try anyway.  So bring me my six shooter and a squint so I can be the hero of this movie ride off into a perfect sunset where it's never raining. You can't script raindrops, they do not care where they fall, only that they do not fall alone. And we all want to share this with someone, so I'll just watch the storm clouds roll in alone tomorrow, but tonight I hold myself lightly. I do not set sights on my own soul anymore, no more to not allowing warmth in at the risk of remembering you, my greatest strength now is allowing myself to be weak and open to becoming r a i n f a l l . 
5.
Everything is spinning. Oscillating to a balanced flow, you are a whirlwind of stardust, you immaculate constellation, supernova currents sliding off your hip sway, the record just keeps playing. The song never stops, just changes.  I am a broken record symphony stuttering along to the harmonies of moonbeams. I am loud light leaping in step, vibrating in time, shaking the solar system like a snow globe, this, tidal hourglass lamp glow, black hole spherical mirror carving out its place in the emptiness, and showing me the way to do the same.  I am whirling static, drifting through nothing in attempts to prove I'm something.  Maybe then, I am drunken compass that only points towards self-fulfilling prophecies. Perhaps a comet that only travels in fiery pirouettes.  All I know is I am a current that always comes home, if only to just leave again. I'm a wheel of crashing waves balanced on top of a gyroscope The sound of a car crash coming from a music box.  A shotgun in the symphony Harmonizing with the screaming Cruel beauty is irony with a sick sense of humor And I am just someone watching the train wreck get painted, standing in awe, thankful for the mere opportunity to think of this as art. 
6.
I'm not the best I'm gonna be.  Not yet.  But I'm the best I've ever been.  Lotus flower blooming with mathematic grace.  I am a ship constantly setting sail to someday, shadows cast on my past as I chase the sun, always arriving at  Now.  The future has never looked brighter, but then again I said that yesterday, and look how much more shimmer it got since I finished this sentence.  But sometimes I enjoy polishing the sides of my head with my fingers, waxing them with anxious worry, I like to think the paranoia is just keeping me alert.  I forget to untie the knots of my being and allow myself to unwind to singular wave.  I get bound by traffic and deadlines and forget my surroundings.  I have begun dabbling in the language of aether  It's mostly silence I am relearning the language of myself every day. I am a song that keeps changing time and key, I am a ballad that I, the universe, is singing to itself, and dammit if I'm not seducing myself with my story.  I'm curbstomping my ego whenever it gets too close to my tongue, letting love steer this ship instead of licking currents all the way to Lost.  I will sail these currents until I find myself in them. 
7.
I am thankful everyday I still haven't figured out how to be normal. How to effortlessly handle life and its procedures, praise be to my faulty wiring.  I like to think poetry helps us be better people by comparing artistic perspectives otherwise unconsidered and unseen. That it helps rebuild the writer and the listener from broken, preserving the writers very flawed existence in the recital.  But if every poem helps rebuild, and rewire the mind to a better understanding of life relative to the subject at hand, what happens when the mind is reassembled, soul speak healing the Self all the way to complacency, tell me do the poems die? Axl Rose couldn't write shit after he got out of therapy and that scares me.  Does my broken reflect the light, not the surface itself? I'm ok with being ok, but not at the expense of artistry.  But I realize that the human body dies off and completely regenerates about every 7 years. Cells decomposing and coming together again, constantly crashing like waves in a mosh pit,  I am constantly collapsing and coming together.  The process will always need maintenance. Fuses blow, wires fray, hearts break.  There's a dangerous silence in peace.  You can't really describe it, and I don't think it needs to be.  But the serenity can empty your notebook if you let it.  Don't get lost in the euphoria, or the depression, bring something back to tell the rest of us, because I think we need that, for the coming together.  To hear tales of unrestricted love and freedom found in absolute darkness, and not have the credits roll right after nah this one is real y'all.
8.
Floorboards 02:26
They might as well have taken the floorboards too. The year was 1997, the year the gestappo wolves barged in, flashing badges wih a double S for Social Services. They took our home and dismantled it as if it were merely procedure. We are not procedure.  We, the forgotten youth of those who couldn’t save us from being swept beneath the rug of blind justice 3-5 years after she turned a deaf ear, children are not meant to be shuffled like cards, traveling from deck to deck, foster home to foster home, until they find someone who will window shop for their future like they actually have that right, I apologize, but I have a mother, who worked 3 jobs just to make sure our bellies were full. Instead, the roots of my family tree were hacked in two, growing into divergent branches I either  couldn’t find my smile in, or didn’t recognize. When asked in school to fill out a genealogy, I was ‘that kid’ who knew nothing of how his bones were grown, but I knew they were not filled out and filed from official paperwork bloodline that means nothing when you realize that the family reunions don’t really include you.  So I forfeited my secondhand skin and traded it for a past that no one would stare at me for.  I sometimes wish my first Halloween that I remember hadn’t been partitioned with a bulletproof pane of glass between the two of us, but it was ok, I was Superman that day, nothing could stop me. Not the paperwork half truths and testimonies of the demons cooking up trouble by the pharmaceuticals they’re supposed to be selling, or how our fingers were ripped apart like an unwanted zipper, no… I was Superman.  But when the cape came off and the sugar rush went away, I remembered that being under that rug was uncomfortable, it got really dark in there, and you got stepped on more than your unknown bones could hold sometimes, but you know I was too young to realize it would be almost half of one of Christ’s lifetimes before I saw her again, and I wish I could take those nails that built her thorny cage and turn them into a chair, you know you work so hard Mom, you should rest those feet, and now you can. I’m home.
9.
Paradox 03:05
Left brain is numbers. The senses and what is considered, logical, tangible, scientific reality.  Right brain is paint splatter, feelings and personal experience.  Which one should we listen to? Which one is to be followed and respected in this delicate experiment of a dance we call living? Its  Logic vs Faith Chaos vs Grand Design Silent Death vs Eternal Conscious Life Are we capable of anything we set our minds to? Could we reach into the void between sky and shine and grab tight where Icarus fell short? Does a cancer know it is a cancer? Does it feel remorse as leeches through the host, choking the life from its surroundings, do we? Its the cold clarity of the automatic model, that we are just talking monkeys on a cold rock, spinning through nothing, against the warm delusion of the collective godhead. Chemical vs Astral Insanity vs Genius Don't be ridiculous vs Hallelujah But if all matter is just particles of light condensed together, humming at a certain frequency, are we not the echoes of singing stars? The walking proof of our ancestors love transcending space and time? Symphonic legacies all wandering alone, but at the same time, harmonizing together, so is existence not a song? Chaotic grinding gears vs scripted flowing dance Trophies vs trying Yin vs yang Yet we know these opposing forces are not one true, one false, but both equal parts of the same whole. So its really  Fear vs Love. Now Love is conducive to both halves of the brain, left brain now has a safe place to survive and a chance to continue the bloodline, which is is primitively logical, and the right brain and Love have always gotten along fairly well, many a paint was splattered for Love. So if we are these screaming stardust warriors, are we not nature Itself? And is to love the nature surrounding us, and how it helps us survive, not to love ourselves? Right brain says be grateful for the moments, left brain says be aware and present in the moments, but I say, with the full fusion of two separate forces now entwined, that if you  Love every natural flowing moment of experience you are given, and upon Dying the television of conscious thought should simply turn off, then at least you left the channel a better show than when you got here. But should the TV just change channels, then let's check out that other channel. Or perhaps the TV turning off is a channel in itself? Perhaps its just about perspective, and how you choose to see it all, so why not choose one based in Love?
10.
At the age of 11, I walked into Mr. Dunham’s wood shop class, just ready to build a stool.  We were learning the concept of an assembly line. 22 people at 22 stations each doing one thing, and in the end you have 22 stools.  I was in charge of the table saw.  I made the initial width cuts on the boards, I was the first stop on a long line of learning.  I was just glad to be a part of something.  I still ate my lunch alone in the cafeteria but here, I was a link in a chain, a gear in the clock, just as meaningful as all the others FUCK YEAH I WAS INCLUDED! As I repeated my tedious process of pushing the boards into the spinning teeth, I watched the saw blade glide through the grain, and I just really enjoyed that.  I couldn't see what these boards were becoming, I just had to have faith that the other gears would turn as well. So I sent them off to be sanded and rounded and polished and assembled no evidence they had once held birds and leaves in their fingertips. Or the initials of lovers in their sides Once we were finished, the stools were all handed out, all identical, each with traces of 6 graders gluing skills oozing out the pegs,  I gave mine to my adoptive mother for Mother's Day that year.  We haven't talked since that thanksgiving I didn't come home.  I like to think she still has it.  Maybe sometimes she takes it out, stares at the grain in the wood, notices the similar ones in her hands, and how they both look like life now, sighs, and puts it back in the closet where she keeps things like that.  Maybe she threw it out.  But I know my fingerprint is just like a woodgrain, and we  are just a forest of things  not yet washed away  in the storm

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debut poetry album by Charles Dalton Telschow

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released July 6, 2017

audio tracks self produced with love and devotion in my basement and the printed version was published by Denver's Punch Drunk Press,

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Charles Dalton Telschow Denver, Colorado

Charles Dalton Telschow is a 23 year old Denver poet and musician. He has competed in the city poetry circuit for several years, traveled to Congress to perform poetry, and was formerly in a metal band. He now finds refuge in writing, playing guitar, and singing. ... more

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