Life's many gifts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diYAc7gB-0A

making space

Her
        nature

explicit

an enigma

           and yet

it is clear like a drop of dew

               in my hand

my fingers curl
around the leaf
I drink from this
and there
I've managed
to make room in my mouth
for more
than just words

Stalwart

This subterranean love sick vessel,
washed ashore,
Forlorn, half-starved,
bleeding.

And those God-awful things,
of shipwreck and despair,
harbored and clung to the pillars,
not unlike a wasting disease,
something undiagnosed,
slowly fading like that phantom encounter in the bathroom stall,

And turning, over and over, each wave tumbled that love,
smoothing the edges,
washing again fine grains,
losing the imperfections,
losing its hardened identity,
until finally, before it went away forever,
lost in the loam,
it was picked up by a soft hand,
upon which, she cast her gaze,
and there that rough and tumbled stone lay,
looking her square in the golden glint of cornea,
her darkness letting go,
light coming in.
there she stood to ponder,
how such a stone came to be.

Paper cut

Communicating with the Dead

I cut off the finger,

that was tempted to text you.

First I used acid.

It bubbled. But it didn't fall off.

Then I used the kitchen knife,

the one I sometimes use to open parcels,

like that big envelope that came last week,

with the book about trees, the trees that communicate with the dead,

but the knife was too dull.

I finally got out the hatchet,

the one rusted from chopping wood at camp,

with the leather sheath,

It took it clean off.

I had some relief with the finger gone.

Lasted...oh I'd say about a week?

Then I found out,

it was my heart that had betrayed me.    HER.     Then I shook my head.     She had called on you. 

It was Saturday, before hallows eve. I came home from a party and cried in the kitchen.

She had stayed awake...had too much chocolate. Her ventricular mouthed your name.  The bloody viscous nature, 

the way the words called down the moon.      

       That silvery lust, 

that mote of despair,     that blood,     it ironed the air.

Oh what a pity. 

She did not know... that when she called on you ... you might answer.

Moan

Tonight we cried together.
The release had been waiting. Hugging my shoulders,
buried in grief behind my shoulder.
It could not surface when I drove the 30,
although it had been let go before,
out the windows,
billowing and deep.

My whole body needed what was delivered.
Better than any sermon.
It is hungry and gospel, and raw, and ours, and
ever secret.

We hung onto the words as they lingered in the humidity,
Something in the way we cry,
allows us to live.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adrienne-richs-poetic-transformations

I need to make an eye appointment.

I saw Venus in the produce section

I am a seeker.

I walked into the rooms of addiction seeking a better way.

When I couldn't get clean on my own, I sought community.

I sought truth.

I had a friend.

for 16 years we grew up, then grew apart. Like a tree hit by lightning.

I tried to make amends, but she reminded me that forgiveness does not mean

I get to come back, I'm not a part of her bark anymore,

we'll always have the same roots,

but the fruit we bear now holds different knowledge.

Different experience. Different sweets. Different sours.

And when I look back,

I realize I've come a long way.

I'm not looking for my other half,

I am looking for my parts to make me whole

That got dismembered.

That got damaged.

How dare I?

I don't look to my friends as fixers, dealers, or something in between.

I look beyond those standing on the side lines – waiting for the answers to hit them in the head.

My friends are dirty, poor, and rich with the work. Doing the work.

I look to the other truth seekers.

In the rooms,

we moan together,

we cry together,

and laughter falls out the doors, into the halls for all to hear.

Because life is bigger than that thing we drank,

for me it was 24 years of hiding in a bottle.

Lost in it. Avoiding. Not seeking.

As I write

about love,

it does not mean I've found love.

Just as one who writes about a blister,

is not a blister. Is not an expert on skin conditions.

If I wrote about broken bones,

I am not a broken bone. I've never set one that has gone astray.

I know of love because it was there once,

disguised as a four letter word.

Wearing a fancy hat,

flocked and feathered,

not fearless,

but full of fuckery.

and now it grows for me.

Only me. I seek to be free.

I seek to build mine back up,

those smarts I dumbed down.

And we walk together,

arm in arm,

running into each other,

at the grocery store,

smiling 'cus tonight we're going to remember to eat vegetables,

smiling 'cus we sober as fuck.

Here we go down aisle 9,

holding tight to our list,

crossing things off,

one at a time.

“the hard season will split you through. do not worry. you will bleed water. do not worry. this is grief. your face will fall out and down your skin and there will be scorching. but do not worry. keep speaking the years from their hiding places. keep coughing up smoke from all the deaths you have died. keep the rage tender. because the soft season will come. it will come. loud. ready. gulping. both hands in your chest. up all night. up all of the nights. to drink all damage into love. ” 


“If we must both be right. we will lose each other.” 

“you can not remain a war between what you want to say (who you really are). and what you should say (who you pretend to be). your mouth was not designed to eat itself. "

― Nayyirah Waheed

Little Golden Threads

Motherfucker.

Mother. 

Gutter. Goddess,

Hear my prayer.

The boundaries aren't on the outside,

like chain link and razor wire,

them boundaries be on the inside,

and they stick like cleavers.

I sat in the anarchist space,

pushing my boundaries out,

    flexing.

It was hot in there,

the zines covered the walls,

my eyes focused on the one for talking about consent.

The meeting began with the serenity prayer like always.

Our words addled rich phonetics, rhythms of sobriety, our mouths moved with dry pitches of swelter and sweat.

Mud hung on my boot from Oaks Park.

My sweat stunk. My cigarettes stink. I sat in my sweat in the folding chair.

      We talked of gratitude.

      We talked of sanity.

It is this golden thread sanity.

It is the threads that floated in the air at the park. Attached were green larvae, falling from the oak trees softly. The silk thread picked up glints of sunlight, and stuck to our hair and faces.

I picked buds of medicine from the mud.

The buds of medicine sat in the spaces between the folding chairs,

hovered above the tacky floor.

The medicine was exchanged

in the backroom       to be delivered with clean needles,

they    shoot     up      out      back –

And we say the serenity prayer.

We smoke and hear the parties . . .

on the tongue of that summer stuck in waffle cone, coating the tip of buds.

And the street lights pop on when

I stride down Lombard –

carts lit up – the golden arches lit up.

I hear the beats of my heart in my headphones.

My bus comes as life goes by in a Nissan with no lights on,

and we break our little gold threads

until we meet again,

Amen.

Ode to a Beautiful Nude

With a chaste heart
With pure eyes
I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music

Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes

The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth

From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form

It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within

The moon lives in the lining of your skin

-Pablo Neruda

Love After Love

The time will come, when with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

-Dereck Walcott

Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.

- Jeffrey McDaniel

old notebooks

3/9/11

Ashes

...And they always turn back into
    humans   lest we forget.
humming
looking at the moon  
glow
as dust gathers 'round
your shoes.
We melancholy madness,
weak and powerless,
haunted by memories,
and leaven things.
Crying to our mothers',
they too forget,
we are all still human things.

11/3/09

-Skinner Blues-

Calm as a cobra on a cold day/
I feel no pain as I shed old skin/
I feel no pain at all/
she makes me taller/
up against the wind/
I feel no pain,
as I settle in.
I carry her/
like a first violin/
I'm calm as a cobra on a cold day/
In the shade/
In the shade/
not scared of the shadow/
or the hint of rain.

Many memories of May

She spoke softly as we talked of magic.
I remembered how much I missed my mother. May is full of remembrance.
How I wished the shuffle of her feet still moved across the earth.
Now I have my own steps, moving with the music, joy, and sorrow that life gives me.

When I fall asleep the ghosts visit me.
I sat in a graveyard last spring,
enchanted by this one grave marker...
it was made of wood and the grass was encroaching,
and trying to make it disappear.
The wet grass stained,
I caught my breath.
The next time I sat in a cemetery was to bury her.
I said words, no one else did.
All I have is the earth of the town named "Ash Tree",
and the memory of shuffling feet.

Roses on Sunday

She said I was "difficult".
Am I ?
Yes. She said.
I thought a moment.
Okay, I'm difficult. But I'm not...
"Yes", she said.

Coarse

With rough tongue
the wound was met
And salt mixed with saliva
iron of blood
and she pushed
further.

Today's horoscope

We feel what we feel in our own time.
We make our parts from these...
We make our moves under the stars from these...
We navigate the chambers with our ghosts.
We grow at our own pace.

We aren't looking for that hardened muscle.
We reassemble the lost parts of ourselves along the path.

We are looking for that love, without strings attached.
One that challenges us to grow. ..With ourselves.

Returned Postage. Wrong address.

I.

My night-watch

Peering into the dark,

over the walls,

watching the steel gray fog settle into the valley.

The tones of our voices start to fall low,

into indecipherable murmurs

of what we once meant them to be. Heavy. Hallow. Sacred in nature.

Held onto like that pulse we can't control. Woven into the cloth of desire.

Off in the distance is the River Styx. The boatman slowly rows downstream.

The steam of our breaths and steady, beat, steady, moans, drum,

keeping us in the land of the living. They … the They... Sheltered from the heavy, sheltered from the cold.

Her Santa Muerte nature is holding too tight to the shadow.

And They stand on these banks in limbo. Too rigid to let go of their coins.

It was the coins she pulled. But it was really the cups.

If They embrace all the shadow, we have no room for light.

I want that light.

The Southern Gothic, relying on the harm of strangers, hitting the swinging light bulb,

suspended

from the falling ceiling,

it crumbles, as the bed hits the wall, as the fist hits the wall.

Fade into the unhappy ending.

I want feel good.

Good that my heart can heal.

Good so I can fall in love with myself in every pour,

and then seep into an another like a wound filling.

Good with all my being.

Good so that I can heal.

Good does. Good does not ... hit the wall.

Stuck in a room of walls.

But the want to swing a sledge hammer at the stucco does not harbor the stagnate shadow self.

Hammer reveals the cinder blocks that have taken over my space. My healing.

My fucking god. Get me out of this room.

I want to let that light in.

It comes over the valley. It shows us the way.

Sparkling on the dew of the fields. Away it sails again.

She is healed.

II.

Sobriety

Sour-punch

suck

satisfied

sulk

sound-off

succubus

sanctuary

sure

said she

sorrow

satisfied

smug

sorry.

Ash

She swept through the land
as a volcano disrupts
a sleeping village.

How calm and quaint we were,
with our tiny boats on the calm sea,
gazing through      murky waters,
shimmering lights of the silver fishes.

And one day she spoke,
clouds blocked out our sun,
and the mighty Kali Ma
brought on a storm
and ripped through our hut made of sticks.

When the ash blew away,
        and the tide waters cleared,
that, that the sulfur had claimed,
gave life to a new flower.
And it stood erect against the wind.
              It stood alone on the bank,
taller than anything that ever came.

And she sang to the sea,
She sang of the day,
that the mountain gave way,
and the storm that blew,
and the volcano that changed, all
that she knew.

Salted

My heart was not a place to rest your weary head.
My arms do not wish to bear the burden of your regrets.
Go ahead and continue walking past,
This being is not the place for you to regain your breath.