all my lost fathers

Red sings on the 3rd Street Promenade between Santa Monica Blvd and Broadway. Regular hours. Something like 8 pm to 11 pm, Monday through Friday. Red must be in his 70's now and the American flag behind his chair gives him the look of a veteran. He plays his guitar seated - mostly folk ballads in the vein of John Denver, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan. When he's playing I can't help but be drawn in. These are the songs of my childhood and Red's steady voice wraps around me like a long-awaited paternal hug.

I'm joined by a homeless man. His white-yellow beard reaches down to his chest. He sits on the same kind of walker my grandmother used. She called it her Red Racer. When it's not aiding in that unutterably tedious task of walking, it substitutes quite well for a chair. I watch him gently pull a blanket from beneath his seat, unfold, and place it neatly across his lap. When it slips askew moments later my impulse is to righten it for him.

I am not repulsed by your sunburnt fingers or back-alley cologne my fellow music enthusiast, my friend. Nor am I frightened at the prospect of another thwarted act of love. 

I have not forgotten you, John Denver. I have not forgotten you, Bob, Paul, Art, Cat, Leonard, or James. I have not forgotten you all, my lost fathers.

slings and arrows

I've been hurting over the willingness of people I thought I was once close with to villainize me. It's really a strange thing being elevated in status from a person basically struggling, confused, and heartbroken, to an entity of mythological proportion. But, I suppose a threat doesn't have feelings, it's just a threat - an object of scorn and fear. While it is a distinct and undeniable downgrade from being human, it's not a position without power.

This is the dual life of the scapegoat. You are the honorary symbol of dysfunction, yet the only one who gets credit for having any agency. Someone points a finger and says she made me do it, or better yet, I would never do that. While I get to remain responsible for my own choices, everyone else involved is just a puppet.

In this black and white world, I am the black, the wrong, the bad. And as the bad one, I lost the right to feel hurt. I became invisible behind a screen on which others projected their fears (and formed alliances behind). People secretly love a villain. It validates what they always suspected to be true, that they are better than others. Disregard a person's total hypocrisy in numerous other ways - their transgressions big and small - on this count, they are fucking pious and will scream it from the rooftops.

Forgiveness is a slow process. Being human isn't enough, you have to deserve what you get. Well, I've decided I get to hurt. My gift to myself. I won't pretend the slings and arrows don't still land because they do. But I would rather sit with my grief rather than run to new dependencies. I will sit with my imperfections because I am ashamed. Not for all the debts I'm accused of owing, the pound of flesh, but for trading my love, my sense of self-worth for a lie.

"When we allow ourselves to be irritated out of our wits by something, let us not suppose that the cause of our irritation lies simply and solely outside us, in the irritating thing or person. In that way, we simply endow them with the power to put us into the state of irritation, and possibly into one of insomnia or indigestion. We then turn around and unhesitatingly condemn the object of our offense, while all the time we are raging against an unconscious aspect of ourselves which is projected into the exasperating object." ~ Carl Jung

Baba Yaga

You can hide behind another, like a bairn behind its mother's
skirts, but you're still scared of me. And you should be
for I've shed my earthly status for the realm of fantasy.

In the funhouse mirror of your eyes, I'm difficult to read,
as deformed as Baba Yaga sharpening her teeth.
But the bony one is hard to kill, I won't die easily.

Not because I'm supernatural or impervious to your swing.
It's simply hard to win a fight against your own psychology
(and it began long, long before I was ever on the scene).

In a few days, my understanding no more enriched than now, I place myself in the center of a green crater off the coast of Maui.

one, two

it's ok, really

no judgment

just numbers

like 4 follows 3

you're simply not 

strong enough yet

in yourself,

not for me.