portrait

5 things I am grateful for today:

1. Coffee
2. Black clothes
3. The voice of Sarah Vaughn singing "The very thought of you".


4. I don't have an amends to make today.
5. Me

gravel peel faithfulness

When the route reveals you

I sing.
I am sad.
The trauma is there.
The confusion is there.
I won't use a bible verse to convey the mixed feelings of my heart.
I don't care if you ever glance my way.
Because I feel what I feel because they are my feelings. All the muck and grime of living,
and breathing.
I feel the sadness of my friends' dad's death anniversary.
I want to cry. But it's stuck.
I have this ache inside of wanting someone to make me feel whole when the world has sucked me dry. If you only knew how hard I have to work to get through.

This is my confession.

This is my priest.

I tell you I am sick. I am neglected. I am all the things real and felt. I am proud, and hurt. I am all these things all at once. I am allowed to feel.
And I hold compassion in my heart for those who suffer. And I'm also stubborn in what I give out. Because I give out too much.

---Save your receipts for the returns.

And I exist because I have kept going, fighting, loving myself.
And I do miss you. You showed up in my dream last night to be exact. You told me you love me. And I did not say it back. I got in the car with a woman named Daisy, that I've never met in real life. But I've helped keep her sober. And I got in her truck and drove away.
That is exactly how I feel. Confused.
How am I?

I really dislike the sound of my housemate's laugh. It is like chalk on blackboard. I am full, and I am sometimes petty. I have less headaches. I still don't do the things I used to do when I get lonely. But sometimes I move from alone to lonely and back again. And that is how I ebb and flow.
And I described to my therapist the duality of my being. And the tip of my tongue is not being bit off...because it is okay. I am okay. I am okay. I am loved.

and now i cry.

"It was working poorly, like a set of disjointed legos." -1/26/15

Tonight's walk on Fernhill

The remnants of Christmas' soft glow bathed the street in light.
I walked past 6114, where the dearly departed's last bits of furnishings stood in mourning, waiting for their new home ... like the orphaned belongings of a sole guardian. It was my fourth or fifth visit to these ruins. I don't know why I was so drawn to them. Maybe it was because it felt forbidden? Taboo? To casually rifle through decades of life tossed on the curb.
Rounding the corner of Holman, the sounds of the saturated grasses, breathed to break the silence.
Upon an open window I voyeur-ed, and saw the affections of adults.
I walked to reclaim the neighborhood,
trying to forever shake the ghosts of yesterday.

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