Blossoming

 When I started this blog I lived in Quito, Ecuador. I started it sitting in the living room of a 4th floor apartment that had large floor to ceiling windows from which you could see a snow-capped peak, far, far off in the distance. 

I worked in a bar, called NoBar, rather a club that would become packed on weekends and most weekdays.

I stood in the middle of a large U-shaped elevated bar that had, in the center, a wide open space that we danced within. Sometimes we could call up guests, for example birthdays of the night, and shower everyone with champagne. 

This space was where I talked to the other bartenders and barbacks. What you might call a traditional bar, with a bartender and a shelf of liquor behind him, was just a small area of square-footage, located near the top of the U. We took the liquor to patrons seated around the bar, and talked to them. 

I lived in this apartment, about 5 blocks away, to the Northeast, a white and tan facade. I would walk up the white stairwell, open the door, walk through the living room, and go to my room, the window of which looked East and was above the head of my bed. The walls were white, I think there was a closet to the left of my bed, and I had a small shelf, contents on each tier exposed, on the wall to the right.

I remember taking the bus in Quito-- staring out the window, watching the bus attendant get off and on at stops, calling out destinations. I remember watching the city from the bus windows-- bus stops at the elbows of curved roads, green grass, tan five story buildings, fences, noise, advertisements, perhaps an old woman, all passing by. 

I would sit, up in my apartment, in a chair facing the windows and write. I started the blog because a guy I liked was a writer and I wanted to be a writer too.

I think there was something in me that never understood that to be a writer, to become one, to be known for it, I would have to bring my writing out into the world too. I never knew there was a world that could hear my writing, that it would be possible to grow my writing into. I'm aware of that now-- the belief in a world that didn't have me in it. 

We are deep wells

We are deep wells. There is the here and the forever. I sit in a Coffee Shop, New Amsterdam, some techno playing. They boy behind the counter is joking in a loud pointed voice, some people you just want to see naked!, a young man has entered through the glass door, serious, a nicely trimmed goatee, a forward stare. This guy knows, the barista says, as dark hair approaches the counter. I am looking, he smiles, he looks at me, his dark eyes crinkle, we smile, somehow sharing an involuntary ripple of this surface, the joke darting and flowing from the barista into us and we receive. And I am struck in this smiling by how we share and how we do not. We smile and then I feel the depths of me that remain untouched, sitting bodily in this coffee shop of purple floors and painted walls. But we have shared a smile. I look over, now he sits again, serious, with the stare that no one can touch. But when he leaves he jokes with the baristas, the owner passing him in the glass door way salutes him by name, his face open and calm, they touch a bit more deeply maybe, do not just share a smile, but reach into a joint past as they pass, a shared deeper surface that I cannot see but perceive.

That's where the light enters you.

Don't turn your head.

Keep looking

at the bandaged place.

That's where

the Light enters you.

And don't believe for a moment

that you're healing yourself.

-Rumi

I sit at the table eating quinoa and greens and I think of a friend who said to justify development, something like, poverty always goes down when the United States goes into a country. And another friend who wrote, while in a village in Guatemala on the edge of a volcano, maybe we are missing the point when we exert so much energy into the preservation of life, rather then the spirit of life.

And I see women bending over to pick up tunics draped over branches drying on the side of the river. I imagine drumming and dancers in a circle in a village center. I see women cooking all day.

And it hits me in full body how our culture’s better or worse is completely of our culture. When we say, it is better to have a democracy, better to have material wealth, better to have individual freedom, we state what we are, what we value. We state how we believe in filling our void. Better and worse come from what we are, and are for us to follow. They cannot be transposed. I know the women in other cultures are rich in ways I will never be or know. I have freedoms they will never be or know. Life is simply lived, it is vast and different, there is a beingness to it all.

I ponder this because I have been thinking about what I want to do and my place in the world and where my care comes from. I realize I feel broken and I want to work with women like me in the United States. But for some reason some cultural voice in the back of my mind tells me to look to the poverty and suffering beyond.

Yet I feel my womanhood has been lost. I don’t know what it means to be a woman. That’s something I confront sitting at the small table pushed into the L of the sink and wall of my narrow kitchen (the clock is ticking). I don’t know what it means to be a woman.

I have a vagina, I have breasts, no one can say women and men do not each possess things the other does not (yes the line is blurrier than we thought). So that is a physical fact, but what is the beingness, the livingness, the magic, the corporeal essence that I as a woman own? I know she is there, I feel my own bodily power snuck behind what I know, living hidden as my own, so that I know one day I may possess my body, my being as distinct, as mine. It is so faint I cannot even speak it.

My identity has formed around traits that are not my own.

I can barely even move, sitting in this power, in this space, sitting in myself in the light at the kitchen table, scraped clean plate in front. I am a woman!!!!! Yet I have no idea how to act as a woman from the beingness that arises from within, I can only sit with her, still, besides my scratching pen, like the purple tulips on the window sill, reflected on the glass against the black of night.

So I ponder the place of this task. It is that small, to belong to my body sitting at a kitchen table in a thin wooden house in Berkeley on a Sunday in February at night. And to me it is huge. It belongs to the world around me. Because here I was born, here in the United States in Miami, and here is where I don’t know what it means to be a woman. Here in Florida, in Connecticut, in California, is where I can see you don’t know and you don’t know and you don’t know and you don’t know. The question is from here, of here, for here. For all of you here right now, it is we who don’t know. It is my gaping hole that I must know to be whole.

That is why I know it is absurd for our culture to say better or worse for others, for an individual to say better or worse for others, for me to think I should be looking to fix something beyond. We as humans, as cultures, find it easy to see another’s lack from what we have. We think our negative space is their hole. It is easy to try and fill our negative space with what we have.

But our own gaping hole is our lack of what we have. Their gaping hole is their lack of what they have, not their lack of what we have. An amputee lacks a leg, not an elephant snout. I want my womanhood, what I have but do not possess. These are the holes that lead to wholeness. These are the holes that the light shines through. One’s hole, a culture’s hole comes from the earth in which it has lived. It is that particular, that personal, that rooted, that small. That large and absurd to the one who feels it as she sits at her kitchen table.

Every culture and being lacks and has. I do not know what the women washing laundry on the riverbank have or what they want to fulfill their beingness. But I know it is theirs and intact. To bring wholeness we must build into that true void with what we have been given, using the tools with which we have learned how to build. Tonight I have a pen, paper, a computer, words, and my kitchen table. It is not ours to take their space, to pretend to know their void. It is ours only to know and create from our own.

Writing I return to you.

Walking in the morning a strange clarity holds my body, standing fastened into the fog. This, where the buses rumble by and screech and much is grey and cracking pavement, is a neighborhood of intricacies. Grey walls like the grey fog.
Many forms sit. The still walls and pillars of homes jutting into and out of the fog. Vaulted roofs so the sky too must make itself triangular. The unintentional force of form. This place has more cracks than some. More colors, purple walls and purple flowers smashed into a corner, behind a chain link fence, taunting the wild yard of shadow, scattered junk and planted vegetables across the street.
The houses haunt me, are an absurd facade. Especially the orange ones. Through them I imagine a life so different from my own. Maybe a woman with long dark hair, two children, pudgy, speaking spanish, a love affair across the street, across the blue steps, crosses on the wall, jangling bracelets, collapsing on a chair after a long day's work, writing at the kitchen table, cooking pollo for her mom, wailing at an end, watching tv for hours and dancing to salsa on a packed patio miles away. Yearnings for another land. And whisps, two women with slicked back hair pushing a stroller turn past the oak bush with its thick mass of leaves, a nebulous leaf conjuring itself in my mind. But the orange here sits still.
A man in jogging shorts, curly dark hair adorning his somewhat toned arms, sweats by on the sidewalk across the street. And the street stares. He a flash, the houses a flash, intimations of a deep cycle, of the rise and fall of seasons, of life. Maybe that man is here every morning.
But I am not. I am only house-sitting at a studio apartment with exterior and interior white walls for a woman whose life I know little about, see through her books and fierce sculptures of African women. Today I wander from this sanctuary shrouded in palms growing into banana trees and gargantuan spiked plants, into the fog.
At ten am the neighborhood greets me in honking buses, tweeting birds and its stillness, its refusal to reveal anything of the intimacy that occurs beyond its straight and colored walls. Behind yards scattered with burnt wood chips, trees decked in Christmas light and porches of curved iron railing, everything cramped, everything cracking, everything a little grey. We meet in passing. The flow, the turning behind the flash is ours to sense but never know.

What is this quality of life that is like fumbling in the dark,
picking up objects, asking, is this the way?
Brushing surfaces, turning logs, asking, is this the one?
But to what are you matching the world?
What lock lives inside for which you seek a key,
for which you can say, no that is not the one.
That is your mystery, that which you will never know.
That folded over map that says to you,
as you palpate rocks and stones,
no that is not the way.
Or yes! a trace!
So you face the abyss
with only a vague feeling of camaraderie
Between your skin & the texture of the rocks underfoot
Between your palette & this sweet air.
Nothing, not even a light up ahead.
On either side the forest calls,
come rest in my embrace.
Paths to faraway castles glowing from their stones
caves stretching to dark dimensions.
They pull with their infinite visibility,
Their promise of a known life,
Come here.
Or the rock ledge your foot scrapes up against.
And you imagine the exhilaration of falling
But there you will be another guest, the perpetual child, the eternal king
Wrapped in blankets, yes, warm, but half-dead
For your feet, sensations of the ground ignored,
have long forgotten how to feel.
Listen to stones
Trust the wrinkled texture of the air to lead you home.
For that felt present is your mystery,
only for you is the air so sweet
To the next traveler it may smell of dung
Only for you will this road take you home
Create its beauty with you assent
Ascend, descend, turn corners,
breathe life into this dance between,
this space between yourself and the way
That is your mystery.
You and the air, these stones, these branches,
these travelers & this darkness.
Trust them to lead you home.

Building a mystery

Walking down the street I usually think I know what I see. The houses are namable, their shingles their porches, their piles of junk and designer cars. But there are moments when the world lets you sink. A mile down from my house, near University, a central vein of Berkeley, a woman crosses my path to pass through a wooden gate to ascend the wooden stairs to cross through an anonymous door. The yard is a shadowed cavern with yawning oaks. And just like that the houses begin to speak. I feel their weight surround my body, like flashes of color through a thicket of leaves, all you know is something else must reside beyond. I pass each one, sitting mysteries lined up, meager hints of deep lives, intricate webs of relation that exist through each shingle, each porch, each lexus, each manicured lawn or forgotten patch of grass and dirt. They fall past me, rain drops I will never touch, each full and far away. I cross pavement, the sidewalk continues, and then here is mine. Yes there are shingles, peeling yellow paint, the oldsmobile, but overwhelmingly is the invitation, the opening, the knowledge of vastness, of the whole flower that exists beyond the color in the dark. This is a mystery I have begun to penetrate, whose edges exist beyond the façade, in the lines of faces, the gestures of friends, in countertops and crumpled towels, a mystery that tumbles, that I build and consume. I hop over the locked gate, walk the stone path to the kitchen and remove my shoes. I sing out loud to Sarah McLaughlan’s Building a Mystery as I fry eggs.

The new earth.

Listen.

Music lives everywhere.

On a deck above

the silver-haired neighbor sings,

soulful and melodious,

as she sweeps beneath cloudy skies.

From behind the other fence

a piano concerto dances

whimsical and proud

up and down and around the trees.

Birds tweet and chirp and caw and chipper,

while the dogs engage each other

in a gruff and abrupt rap.

Walk these streets and

hip-hop bolts from car windows and

mingles with Tracy Chapman

hiding behind blinds.

Around every corner,

within every backyard

and through every window

a song lives

and declares itself to the afternoon.

This is the new earth,

where we proliferate

like leaves, like petals,

almost repeating,

everywhere differentiation mingling in rhapsody.

An absurd conglomeration, an impossible harmony.

Once our bodies moved to a single beat.

Now rhythms collide,

we weave around them,

and through each other,

jumping, prancing, shaking,

knotting ourselves into eternity.

Listen.

A long shrill voice jingles on Stuart street.

The ice cream truck vibratoes out front.

A blue jay picks through leaves.

An absurd conglomeration,

The speckled face

an impossible harmony.

of unity.

The rain

I sit in front of a windowpane and listen to the rain. Its full thumping and intermittent splotches appearing on an old wooden bench tell me of its presence. But the atmosphere is only a grey mist interrupted by falling leaves.

A voice inside of me used to whisper, “how dare you sit and watch the rain.” Watching the rain is not productive, they have told this voice. Why watch the rain when I could be drawing, cooking, reading, working, running, learning physics, why watch the rain?

The rain knows. She knows how to sit in puddles, to collect, to allow the wind to move her and a vine to carry her down his spine.

Two weeks ago the skies over Miami opened and I stepped outside. I twirled and jumped and splashed and soaked, and full of waiting rain and running rain I screamed to an old tree, “WHY? WHY? WHY CAN’T I WATCH THE RAIN WHY IS IT GOING GOING NEVER STOP HOW DARE YOU FUCKING TWIRL WHY ARE YOU OUTSIDE AND SO CLOTHED AND FUCKING WET SIT STRAIGHT RUN FORWARD LEARN GO AND GO AND NEVER STOP? WHY?”

The rain kept falling. She just watched. But then I knew that she knew and I knew that I knew that it’s okay to watch to rain, going and going, falling and falling,

Until she,

Stops.

On judging good and bad

We have all heard about the importance of non-judgment. Being inclined towards spiritual teachings, this tenet has haunted me throughout my life. When I hear someone speaking judgmentally my stomach tightens and anger courses through me. I immediately decide there is something wrong with the judger. Recently, while washing my hands, I found myself thinking that a friend who had just been speaking judgmentally was insane, she had to be in order to sometimes spout moral beliefs and at other times speak so vitriolically. But then as I looked up into my angry face in the mirror a little voice whispered, “maybe you are insane..”

And I considered. It is true that in many of my relationships I find myself oscillating between love and hatred. A person is funny or kind so I love them, they are angry or bitter or judgmental so I hate them. In addition to human relationships, the notion that we live in a bad world is buried deep within me. Sometimes I feel everything I use comes from blood money because we had to rape the earth to obtain it. At other times I feel people are essentially good so “something must have happened” to allow us to act bad at all. Chocolate chip cookies are often the epitome of evil when I consider the affects too much sugar has on the body. I had come to live in a world where a baked good was at times equitable with the devil. Maybe the little voice in my head was right. Was I not a wee bit judgmental? Perhaps completely mental?

Then, (probably because I had recently read Alan Watts on overcoming opposites), the source of this insanity hit me like a train: my tendency to see good and bad as two incompatible realities that cannot coexist. We have been taught that certain things are bad and others are good. I picked up somewhere along the way that judgment was bad but each person has her or her own ideas of what is bad: weakness, failure, stupidity, crying, dirtiness, shellfish, whites, blacks, whatever. Yet if good and bad are incompatible then if someone possesses one bad trait they must be completely bad because it is impossible to be simultaneously bad and good. Right?

But what if something can be “bad” and “good.” If a person does a “bad” thing they aren’t completely bad, and if they do a “good” thing they aren’t completely good. People just do things. Cookies can be good if you are starving and bad if you are trying to lose weight. Good and bad are actually very compatible. The realization led me to wander stupidly around my house, utterly confused by how blind I had been, aware that I was excessively judgmental, sensing the long chain of split thinking that had been perpetuated by people to lead me to consider the world in such a way. Victims of a way of thought, of action, blindly become its perpetrators.

So what are good and bad if not separate realities, if not weighty moral judgments? Upon further thinking it seems to me good and bad are directional agents. When we say something is bad it means move away from it, don’t explore it, when we say something is good it means to delve into it. A bad neighborhood is one that we should move away from for safety reasons, a bad person for us is one to whom we shouldn’t relate. Another person will be at home in a “bad” neighborhood or find love with the bad person.

Yet as I write I feel empty upon explaining good and bad as simply ideas, their power reaches into our emotions and bodies. Good and bad are the two edges of the blunt knife we subconsciously use to sculpt our worlds. I see a rat crawling up an areca tree in my back yard and nausea crawls up my throat. A friend is snotty and a certain haughtiness, a cold superiority becomes my being. I worry about food and upon realizing this I slump and become irritable for I am being bad again. The same is true for good. We do not react to what lies in front of us but rather to a thin mental overlay we have subconsciously attached to every action.

When good and bad are absolute categories the world becomes a gross exaggeration of evil and good with our emotions flip flopping uncontrollably between annoyance and excitement. And we lose our power, we sacrifice our ability to understand the world by judging it before we even receive it. This veil is our armor, deflecting what we have the possibility of seeing. And I’ll admit, sometimes our judgments are less painful than the world that is really there. If I actually listen to a friend or myself speaking hatefully about another without simply screaming “they’re crazy!,” I’ll have to feel the hate and the pain that usually accompanies our words, that sits within us just below the surface. The pain is the reality of the situation no matter what, it is something we’ll have to face within the world. But if I say it is wrong and back away I can pretend it doesn’t belong in this world and close the curtains around my fantasyland of pure goodness.

The more personal effect of my tendency to see good and bad as incompatible is my fear of becoming a bad person if I admit any of my less shining qualities to myself. I won’t explore my judgmentalism because if I truly own up to it I’m afraid it would make me “bad” which is incompatible with the “good” persona I have created in my mind. Yet for me, allowing myself to feel the hatred and judgment that I engage in no matter what is good, in other words I should move towards feeling it. The things we hide from are the places we have to heal and thus the places we can grow the most. Judgment is something that is truly within me, that is often useful, and labeling or ignoring our less desirable parts only turn them into our Jungian shadow, subconsciously driving many of our actions. We fear looking into the things we label as bad because we think becoming them will make all the good things we want to be invalid. But my hateful judgments have always lived alongside my caring. By realizing that good and bad coexist many of my fears dissipate, I won’t be bad by facing my scary parts I’ll still just be me, wonderful as well as insane. And the world with its flaws wont be bad, it will just be the world, alive churning, messy, mysterious, and fascinating.

That said, opposing forces such as good and bad are of the world, we simply have a very distorted use of them. In a world with movement there will always be things we are moving away from (“bad” things) and things we are moving towards (“good” things). As we become wise judges, capable of seeing what lies in front of us rather than the veil, it is imperative that we make decisions about relating to our surroundings. Even though we might recognize the good parts of a person, if he often hurts us we must be able to say he is, on a whole, bad for us and move away. Similarly, it is normally wise to avoid dangerous places although they certainly may contain joys. At this point our feelings are not just mere reactions but along with our rationality become fabulous guides, directing us moment by moment towards our greatest good.

On feeling and form, love and loss

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing

There is a field

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about.”

This past weekend, while talking to a friend, I realized he used to love me. I had also loved him. The realization that someone I actually cared about and respected could see me in such a light opened my heart, I physically felt a popping, as if a flood gate had been broken or the door of a musty room opened to allow light in. I entered a place of heart I had not been before. I don’t know why I didn’t understand that I could be loved, that is a story for another time.

But with the realization also came the understanding that many interactions I have engaged in with guys have come from a place of insecurity, I have rarely pursued anything I actually wanted, and have allowed myself to be with people who have been assholes to me. When I understood this I felt an immense sense of loss and regret. I had had love in front of me and had let it go…I bawled for hours, screaming high-pitched guttural noises, it was the only way my body could release the pain of the self-loathing I had felt over the years.

Still, I couldn’t get over the sense that I had lost something irrevocable and felt terribly depressed the past few days. Then today, I had the thought, so you have lost but here you are okay. And I knew it was true, I had lost something but here I was, okay.

This made me think, what is loss? And I see we are constantly losing. I have lost friends, lovers, animals, weight, strength, memories, yesterday, I have lost my childhood, my teenage years, my college years….To live is to lose constantly.

So what remains? Each of these things may have passed but I experienced each one. The experience remains and returns.

At the most superficial level we can say every moment of our existence is unique. Our existence constantly takes on a different form, a different appearance and thus we constantly lose. But with each experience comes a feeling. In truth, most of our feelings, the layer just beneath the outward form of our experience, repeat. It is so easy to forget the day to day because from the perspective of feeling we literally repeat our lives over and over again. The memories that stand out in my mind are times that I really felt something different, mystery or joy or love, awe, wonder, anger or sadness. The times I was touched by how someone moved a hand or answered a question.

When we are interested in a person, it is because we believe we could share a certain experience with them, that is love, and however deep love can go. We get sad when someone who we like doesn’t like us, but in truth we would never want to be with someone who doesn’t share our feelings, because it takes two to tango. If feelings are not mutual the experience that we desire cannot be reached, it is simply the nature of the experience. When you lose a person you lose the potential experience you could have shared with them, the feelings you could have and the understanding you gain by being with them.

When we get attached to a person we confuse that person, in other words a form, with our own potential for experience. We think a person can give us an experience. Rather it is the relationship between us and another that sparks a latent potential in us both. It is literally impossible to lose love. Love is so deep it is shared by every single person, every being, in the entire universe. The potential for delving deep into love is within every single one of us. I know that deep place within myself where I one day hope to meet someone. That place always remains for us to access again and again through different forms.

This doesn’t just apply to love. I assert that the deeper an experience is, in other words the more alive we feel during an experience and the more it is worth having, the harder it is to lose. These deep feelings are the stuff that simply everything is made up of, that is why when we feel deeply, even deep sadness, we feel connected to everything that is. Our potential to feel deeply remains with us forever.

Yet every form does have its own unique character. Here’s a simple example. I found the perfect burrito in New Haven. I probably will never encounter that flavor again but I will experience the feeling I felt while eating that burrito, that is the experience of joy or pleasure that we can get from relating to food. Although the burrito was lost, this feeling will return. Every being (by this I literally mean anything that exists) has its own unique flavor, but the experience of truly connecting with another being’s flavor, the diverse feelings that lie deep within the experience, will be felt again.

The experience, of course, won’t take exactly the same form. In different relationships the words, the gestures, the sights and the sounds will certainly be different. And some of the less deep feelings will be different. Someone you are with might make you laugh a little more, someone might make you think a little more. But I think at the core, every relationship moves toward the same thing. It doesn’t matter who you are with as long as they are willing to go to a deep place with you. As long as you are capable of going there together.

But humans are not tabula rasas. We click with certain human and nonhuman beings. We each have certain structures that allow each of us to experience deep feelings through connecting with different forms. I, for example, connect with words and feel deeply through writing this. We, like elements, can bond in certain ways but not in others. Yet we are all truly looking for the bond.

My friend who had once loved me, also asked if it was important to be unique. The form of our lives is unique no matter what, to access these deep feelings we have to each take our own unique path. We are each made to encounter love or whatever feeling in a different way. But the inside experience of the path is very much the same, or at least has the potential to be the same, from person to person. From my interaction this weekend I gained the experience of deep regret and failure which I know people have felt throughout time. We all possess the potential for the same deep indestructible feelings and I believe at the core we are all looking for the same thing. Practically, we need to become very aware of how we are feeling in any situation so that we can understand what forms and what beings move us towards deeper experience. It is then our choice to follow our own unique path, to interact with the unique forms that move us towards love, or to remain in endless stagnation, attached to forms who, with their constantly changing nature, hide us from how static we have become.

(Thank you to my friend Kezia for writing a blog post on experience, to my mom for showing me something Christopher Alexander had written in the Nature of Order on the similarity of human feeling, to Stacy Vajta for energy healing, and to my friend for sharing his life, these events all coincided so that I could write this.)

I will feel joy

It hits

a pop

and my body sighs with relief

my body, atlas, bearing the load of my woes like a shroud

my body sighs, whispers, weeps,

thank you, thank you

How hard it is to see the things we carry day in and day out

Our burdens like a limb

We forget life without pain

and then

the package topples from our back

the spine erect sighs and

blesses the load bearer for giving it a rest

Don't forget

the burden you carry weighs

down upon all within you

a thousand back bent by the load of one

Set it down my friend

Walk next to me a tall woman

Proud and free

the sea

it is here in my throat

i thrash

i cannot contain it

cannot express it

cannot release it

it is all that i am

how could words be enough

how could body be enough

i shiver

it lies deep inside us all

lies deep

but we know when it has been offended

just as the wave speaks for the sea

i see the sea within you,

i see the sea within me

and the power we have to make waves

to throw stones

to watch the ripples spread

one day i will touch you

one day i will speak to you

one day i will taste you

one day we will look into each others eyes

and see through to the infinite sea

that lies deep within us all

In some other world

In some other world

We're all growing old together

We were there when we all turned 21

Just like we were there when we turned 16

We watch clouds on blankets

As the wind rushes against our cheeks

And "how have you been?" has no meaning

None of us have learned what it means to live in the cold

and changes come in increments

as they should

No one asks what we will do

And we all know everything can be worked out

We carve deeper and deeper infinities inside each other's hearts

and no one can say that a gesture is her own

Yes, in some other world

I've been there often

in smiles and touches and understanding

But today I wonder

If in that other world 16 or 21 really had any meaning

If maybe our desperation, our dreams of separation

Carved the first nicks into which

the stream of our understanding has flowed

in that other world

Could I write poetry

Or taste coffee

Or feel so sad and alone and connected in suburbia

Under blue skies and palm trees on a winter's day?

Goodbye other world

remain in my heart

but today I wake up among paper bags

and plastic and strangers and a million good byes

and a million hellos

But today I will laugh and cry and taste and see

Because I know, deep in my heart, here,

and in some other world,

we're all growing old together

It is I

It is I, the eternal illness

the eternal sick

the eternal dark

the eternal knowledge

that i will never be with you

that we don't see eye to eye

that we claw at one another's

souls

that we were separated at birth

that the cord was cut

that i can say where your body ends

and where mine begins

it is I

eternal lonliness

eternal longing

eternal existence

I am pain, nausea

a heaving torso, a writhing spine

and wet eyes

I am sick with grief

even we are sick with grief

A gulf that pierces us all

right through the center

black stitches through a colored quilt

it is I

I that holds the world together

Autumn

Oh how terrible the beauty of the first day of fall

The girl can only cry

She senses deep power

She senses the wind within

And if she were to perish

So she could dance

But what to do with the body of a mortal

Such power would kill her

Trample her to death

As unharnessed horses

for they know her not

though they rage within

But how to harness the wind

How to tame the sea

to forestall our own deaths must we kill?

She dices her own pain with words

The sea is calmer now

But oh such power

She must be the power

Or she will surely die

of grief

of a broken heart

of the waves crashing into her shell on the sand

But to live

To face the wind with dry eyes

How?

Create her pen whispers in black

Create

Translate

Translate

Translate

May your words sing the wind

Your steps the sea

Your eyes the skies

Your fingers the trees

Your face the moon

Translate, she dries her eyes

Saturday Afternoon

She was a young woman now. She sat on her bed and her heart ached. It ached with deep longing for completion and meaning. For relationship and a shared life. She sensed that depth existed. She felt the call to intense waters, to balance, to encountering a soul, a place, that would shift her own and give the whole a moment of ecstasy. Give her a moment of ecstasy. To fill a latent potential. To strike her match. She longed to burn. Every shifting center has a million purposes through which it is fulfilled. Through which it provides fulfillment. A match when lit, a doll when played with, a car when driven. The earth, we, endow beings with the gift of giving. And those moments of realization of purpose are orgasms, fulfillment, divinity, life. This pen, this ink, this paper, ecstasy. They satisfy the greater situation and so satisfy themselves. But she, where did she fit? Who could write poems with her form? She longed to spill ink. Longed. Was a writer near? She was within her grasp. She smelled a life that she knew long ago. Before she understood anything at all. A candle stand, molded, elaborate, a foot or two tall reminded her of a bygone era, that lived deep within them all. What were all the surfaces referencing? Children, technology, money, Africa, god? Her bedroom told a story of enslavement, though she could not exactly say why. Four walls, a single window, sharp edges, space. No matter where she looked, there she was, within those four walls. They contained her mind. The "outside" shaded and glassed. And there she rested in the middle. Minute, staring at herself from all directions. Floating in space. She breathed in chilled air. Her mother told her people believed in empty space once they stopped seeing the air as a being. A being she had an intimate relationship with, yet she could still only think of molecules and space. A wall separated her and her brother. Floating in boxes in space. Calm because it was Saturday afternoon.

Relationships

My thigh is creamy and very white. Splattered with pinkish, brownish dots that must be my hair follicles. At least twenty very obviously freckles or maybe moles are interspersed with probably a hundred baby pecks of light brown. My hair is short, nicked by a razor a least a week ago. I'm soft to the touch, although the hair prickles. And if I grab her I can get almost an inch of thick grip between my thumb and fingers that jiggles into place for a few seconds after I release it. I think about my thighs every single day. About their girth, about how the world sees them as I strut down the street in a skirt, as I dance, as I run in Carolina. Do they think cellulite, fat, sexiness, normality? Do my thighs draw attention? Do they please your eyes? Do they hurt your eyes? My relationship with my thighs consists more in gauging the petty relationship between my thighs and you. I'm never satisfied with that relationship. You should always be more pleased, I scold.
And then today, I looked at you, at me, and I love you, just because I can. Because I can choose to love you or to scold you. Didn't I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder? And my eyes they streamed tears because they beheld the beauty and the power to behold. And the insanity of relinquishing this power, of living in fear, in self-loathing, just because these eyes can't see what they have the power to see.
I look at my thighs and I see them as my own. My own to love or despise, and though you may love them or despise them, never yours. I want to love mine. Because loving them makes me cry, makes me feel, inspires me. Because when I love them I know I want to love them. And when I hate them I can't even know that I know nothing at all.

Only to find her again

Sometimes I lose my life, only to find her again in a bar, in a conversation, in a completed task, or in a run through the park. She's mine because she has a will, energy, and direction. When she walks in the sand she leaves footprints and they're often crooked, stepping to a jazz that she listens to on her own. The rest of the time I leave scarcely a toe print-jutting off the edge of the communal impression where my shapen foot doesn't quite jive with yours and yours and yours. Its our path I suppose, but we possess it soulessly, without contemplation, with a murky purpose. And all the while phantom ways dance inside my head, leaving vanishing toe prints on my play dough brain and I feel them as something that could be, that could have been. But nothing more. The impulses fade before I can shift even a little toe. To translate a potential into action, imagine the neural pathways that must be run. So we walk, trod, plod, as indicated, aware of a settling unease and oblivious, just oblivious to a source, an escape, to ourselves marching to no end. And then I feel a peck on the neck or forearm and warmth spreads down my spine, into my soles and into my soul. A peck from full lips, anxious and loving, reincarnated upon meeting my molting skin. She's my life. Today I found her in the restaurants and bars of quito, as I shuddered and extended an arm and bent in a demi-plie, listening to myself dancing on my brain. And she grabbed me tight in a sprawling waltz as a stranger laid his life before my eyes. Because I saw how much deeper my feet sink with her and how good the sand feels between my toes and how much happier the course. So me and my life, I think we might shine for a while now. I think we might laugh loudly, and I think we might hope not to get lost again.