yes

The story of Andy and I is a fun one to tell. In it's retelling, I'm reminded how my life has been riddled with signs. And how, in some ways, I've never been left without internal guidance. It would also serve as the perfect segue between my relationship with David, and what followed. But I'm not going to tell it. Not right now anyway.

Right now I'm interested in one of two or three incidents. This first, roughly five years ago, happened in my studio apartment in Decatur. This time, I was crying because I felt I'd done nothing to deserve all the goodness in my life. I felt blessed but unworthy. Do I deserve it? He didn't say anything but wrote one word on a piece of paper, ripped it out of his journal, and gave it to me. I take that word with me wherever I go. It's become a mantra whose repetition I hope resonates throughout my life. Yes was the word he gave to me because I couldn't give it to myself. Yes - a mighty word. A Godly word. A word of absolute affirmation and acceptance. A word closer to love than love itself.

on a bus in Chile

Pet Your Confusion

You set bowls of milk out as offering.
It eats, then curls up in your chest.

Every moment I spent in Chile was stolen. Stolen from a life I was trying to hold onto at home. A non-life, really, as the only thing that was missing from it was my self. David, my boyfriend at the time, basically forbade me from going. His jealousy, fully manifesting itself in our relationship at that point, punctured any happiness I had once felt and kept him in a state of suspicion. He had abandoned himself to his suspicion, actually. Our evening phone calls (they were really interrogations) while I was in Chile left me crumpled, wet, and ruined.

Ruined, but free. There's something liberating about being in a different hemisphere from the source of your pain and self-loathing. Especially when you've been swept from the throws of Winter into beautiful, Chilean Spring. Those ten short days abroad were some of the best of my life. I was mopey and alone. I separated myself from the group every chance I got. I picked flowers and prompted a spontaneous daisy picnic. I was so alienated that any openness or happiness I experienced, was an unexpected gift. Was an experience of Grace. Chile was indescribably beautiful and our cello choir concerts, intense.

There was the concert in the rose garden in Santiago, with white banners streaming. The concert in the ruins of Mora(?) Island, where I had those amazing cherry pastries (there were cherry orchards on the island), saw the school-house and its flowers, and got rained on. The stray mutt I left on the banks whose fate was mine, the black volcanic sand of the beach, and our 18 cellos bobbing up and down in dingy boats across the water - some bizarre procession. Eighteen casualties - our instruments in their black caskets.

There was also the concert in the Catholic church in Valdivia, which was magical. We made sacred music there. Music that was careful not to break the silence too completely. And then there was the unforgettable bus ride along the shores of Valparaiso. Window open, knees wedged between my seat and the one in front of me, hair flying, blue skies, water that stretched from rock to horizon.

Moments like those make you beg whatever higher power exists to kill you, right then and there, because it doesn't get better.

I've experienced other moments of joy like that, and gratitude, when my heart asked to lift itself clear of my chest and join itself with whatever lies beyond.

what would break

Our bodies are dark with mystery. Cells, synapses, heart palpitations, electricity, water, inhalation and exhalation, pores, nerve endings, bones, plasma, veins, etc. Everything in our body works in perfect harmony with itself. Perfect balance and unity. All this without our knowing it.

So what would break if we were to open the munitions warehouse in our hearts (the one where we record everyone else's faults) and let it all go? Who would get hurt? Like America, we feel more comfortable from behind a loaded gun.

the science of uncovery

We work at being seen - forging exteriors that mirror an image we have of ourselves, our hopes and desires. We hide the rest. The rest is what I'm interested in. The rest is what makes Psychology so intriguing, and spirituality, and physics. It is also what renders our approach to modern science so utterly inadequate.

24-Hour Diner

I am the old waitress who suffered a stroke and limps and
slurs her speech, the dead bug in my glass and Matthew sitting
across from me. I am also the jukebox, whose songs I've resigned myself to -
as I'm resigned to keeping full that cabinet, my heart,
resigned to death, resigned to the off-beat thumping of fate.
Old fate, dragging her disconnected happiness behind her - working
hard, banging our hearts around, waiting for a tip.

entertainment

I love breaking whatever social contract binds us to this boring, scripted fucking dialogue.

sit back down

To Whom It May Concern:

Congratulations! 

You've just been judged.

welcome ;)

As all the pricks stand up to welcome you to your new single life.

painful admissions

I don't know what I'm doing...at all.

acceptance

When he finally chose to hold me; arms outstretched, fingers open - I slid between them.

disappointment

I'm not a starfish, I just wish I was.

bedtime stories

I can't bring myself to go to bed. Some nasty realization is waiting for me there. Sea monsters. Bed bugs. America. When my parents divorced my Dad made my sister and I a tape of himself reading bedtime stories. It's the saddest and most beautiful thing ever. I miss being read to - by anybody.

I'm so tired of taking care of myself. I can't endure my own sanity any longer, and sensitivity. I don't know how any half-sensitive person can withstand living in this society. I need to be touched. I need to be inspired. All you fucking zombies out there depress the hell out of me.

the glooms

Something bad happened last night. I don't want to talk about it so please don't ask. Instead, cast me as the star of your own imaginary movie. The starfish that is - for everyone's internal movie is an underwater one. Split me in two, heart and all. In the second scene I'll grow it back, for mine is the power of regeneration.

sleepless on the corner of piedmont and eighth

I can't sleep. If anyone wants to know what I look like in my pajamas, I'm clearly visible from the sidewalk. Just take about 40 paces down 8th street (towards monroe) and face south. Hi, hello.

You think I'm joking?

Come. We can mouth wordless poetry at each other and imagine the other is saying what we really want to hear.

Come. Serenade me. come. break the loneliness of this city and this street and this darkness. come and share. come. be intimate. come. be honest. be embarrassed. be naked. be ashamed. be joyful. be fucking crazy. be your self. come. come come.

Who else is going to tell you the truth tonight?

Fish cont.

The street markets in Chinatown are lined with

baskets of dried fish, boxes of jade ornaments,
meat turning in windows and sugar-sprinkled pastries.
But it's the fish and their many eyes that hold
my attention. I imagine the initial catch - nets taut,
the shimmer and sparkle of movement in the lines.
Will they be used in a soup? Fish broth or sauce?

Edited, I'm Undressed

Drawing in your net
You examine the day’s catch:
Salmon, Pompano or Moonfish.
De-scale and poach with lavender.
Taking careful bites,
Eat what you can of its sweet meat;
Leave the bones.

10 minutes

They held each other for 10 minutes at least. They held each other, even though their car was getting booted across the street.

When all is said and done, you can tell them how horrible I was - how I made you give me massages and never bought the toilet paper. If you want these mistakes you can have them. Mistakes we make because we're young and we still think all the stupid shit counts for something. Mistakes we make because we're afraid of being vulnerable to each other. Because someone told us love is possession and we believed them. Mistakes capitalism would be proud of because if we weren't preoccupied with having and didn't always want more no one would make any money off of us.

The light is getting thinner - as it does at sunset.
Colors don't actually exist, but we see them anyway.
I'd like to believe in will.
I'd like to believe in self-determination,
but I've got somebody else's gum stuck to my shoe
and all my mother's problems.

hearts in garlic

Some say blood,
some rust, but none
are as red as me.

I discovered recently I have a fear of the ocean - especially at night. Its abysmal, incalculable depth. The ocean feels hungry to me even on calm days. Some absurd fish I am. Like the tides want to uncover me, consume me and leave the bones. I think I equate death with the ocean. Not death the way I like to think of it/experience it, but soul-less death. Dispersed into thousands of disconnected particles instead of remaining a whole, sentient being.

Or maybe it's the vastness of the ocean that bothers me. My ignorance seeing itself in the reflection of the expansive. I had a dream once I was submerged in it. Below me was darkness and above me light. I struggled upward until I broke the surface and it was at that moment when I woke. I felt calm after that dream, as if in it I had been protected. I wish I could feel that way again.

love as a

Love exists. Love is waiting only for you to open. Love is urgent as it watches you grow older. Love asks only to be received. Love is transformative. Love opens flowers in the darkness of morning. Love is fire. Love speaks not and thinks not. Love knows. Love I beg not to leave me alone. Love you don't have to deserve but should want to. Love gives everything and takes everything. Love ignites love. Love you have to be blind to see and blind not to see. Love you pray at night to wake up with. Love never grows because it simply is and always was. Love, inseparable from creation. Love as a fetus, a seed. Delicate love. Secret love. Love from behind a veil.

stake your claim

I met a woman yesterday who told me, with pride, that she finally convinced her husband to "convert" to Buddhism. Not only that, but he is looking forward to seeing his first Buddha shrine during their visit to Thailand. P.S. I should visit her blog.

If only belief were as easy as that - like washing dishes and talking about the weather. If only a shrine were erected, in any country, to any prophet, that people could actually go to and see.

Niche got it wrong. God isn't dead, religion is.

Amok.

delicate and luminous as the egg moon

My face is changing. I've got crows-feet around my eyes from smiling too damn much and creases in my forehead from frowning too damn much.

If you were to read these lines, like a palm reader, they would reveal a great trapeze artist. I perform emotional acrobatics. Flips, somersaults, etc. - usually without a net (when we're together). When you're with me we move so fast I can no longer tell who's catching and who's being caught. Probably me.

keeping account we
note each cent given to love-
always wanting more.

leaving day

Valentine's Day, for me, is not about heart-shaped candy and kisses, but bravery, pain, loss and personal transcendence. It marks the eight-year anniversary of my leaving home.

Eight years ago tomorrow my mother walked into an empty bedroom expecting to find me there. It took her a while to understand what she saw. I hadn't left a note. I had even "patched things up" before I left. I didn't want them to think I ran away from an argument. I had stood on the line separating our crumbled driveway and the black-top of Sherrell Drive before, and decided then. A person who runs away is weak. Leaving requires courage.

You take everything from your parents. You even take the absence of giving. You absorb everything into your child-heart. Mine had grown too full. It wasn't a crime of passion. There was nothing to be gotten back, no revenge, no point to be taken or made. It was sacrificial. People judge you for the sacrifices you make in the name of life. But to argue responsibility for others over responsibility for ones self is to deny every instinct and every decision a person makes in life - none of which are wholly selfless. I turned eighteen. I packed, and I left them. I was still in high school.

Erin and another blues bar

We both needed cures last night. Me for restlessness and unspeakable sadness. Erin for alcohol-induced ranting and Coke spillage.

Nowhere is the right place to vent your blues. No venue is blues-accommodating. Bars and coffee houses are practiced at alienating you when you need them most. They don't want your sadness, it spoils the atmosphere. Bars and coffee houses are for romanticists and sexy hipsters; realists aren't allowed. The light they bring is too harsh for those places, even with their dimmed lighting and mood music.

This, at least, seemed to be the case last night. So we went where it made the most sense - Northside Tavern (aka "The Blues Bar"). Except they weren't playing our blues, they were playing middle-class white boy wanna be Elvis Costello blues. It wasn't even danceable. And then there were the alpha male pool hall preppy show-offs we had to contend with, who lurked around our pool table as though they were interested in our game. (I kicked Erin's ass BTW)...(fuck you, I'm not a show-off).

I chain-smoked last night and don't even feel it this morning. Normally I'd sound like Betty Davis.

Oh, and Erin, thanks for leaving your half-eaten piece of cheesecake in my car.

willing

I got my Indian drone box yesterday. It imitates the sound of a Tanpura (an instrument like a sitar). I played my cello with it and it felt oh, so good. Harmonizing is therapeutic, especially when there's no attachment to melody or performance. One note, played with complete concentration and submission can be the most beautiful, expressive thing. When it's your heart spilling out and you know it and choose to let it go anyway. You will it to go.

And you're not embarrassed this time.

mad death

I can't stop dying. I can't wait to stop dying. Maybe healing. Re-creating. Dis-covery. If I were alive I could make some happiness for myself.

He worries there might be someone else because something changed with me, suddenly but not at all sudden. Something broke that was always. There isn't anyone else but it might be easier for him to accept if there were. People understand the language of better and want. They follow their eyes.

love
bitter as iron
we eat as though it were
sweet and easy

Dear John:

At first you pack in secret –
Quietly stowing away your happiness,
Then your grief.

Turning to your belongings,
You look at them in a different light;
What goes and what stays,

What's essential and what you would leave
If it were burning. It's me that's burning.
You can guess the rest.

Majda's house

Every time I leave your house it's the same. The same fog, the same wet grass, the same darkness. Every time I try to make a three point turn and almost hit your mailbox. Every time I feel the loneliness. It sets in before I make it past your hedge (monkey grass that gives me goose-bumps when it brushes against my legs in the summer).

Atlanta was a series of headless buildings tonight. Low clouds. You would have liked that. You're all destruction and slow unraveling. I'm veils and burning fields. You make me certain of my absolute sanity. We scare men at Kinkos into giving us discounts. We stink of smoke and coffee.

Your mother campaigns for me to gain weight and does so successfully. Homemade bread and cheese and salmon - sometimes a piece of cake or a hunk of smoked beef. Some soup or other Bosnian delight whose name I can neither pronounce nor find a word for in English. When I ask your mom to make it I say it's that noodle-wrap-cheesy-meat-thing.

You like fragments too.
not to be broken.
We don't pretend

I hope all those fancy schools in New York reject you. I've told you this. I imagine us in Chicago, nursing each other through graduate school. I want to think about that. I don't want to think about the fires we've set to our lives. Maybe it was smoke that masked Atlanta, disguised as clouds. Like I'm disguised as a wife.

clementines before bed

I'm wearing blue slippers with stars and moons on them. They were given to me in December of 2001 at a company Christmas party. I took off my heels and put them on. I got chided by my boss for doing so - but only because we were at the Ritz.

My fingers smell of clementines because I've just eaten about five of them. There's something about peeling fruit. Oranges, tangerines, pomegranites, grapefruit even. Everything is veiled. Everything breaths, everything shits, and everything has a membrane of some sort.

Burst your bubble.

We often say we're doing something to "get close", but we're usually just talking about physical proximity. Matt wants to "get close" me. I want to "get close" to ____. But I just ate a clementine. What the hell are we talking about?