My second stepfather accelerates carefully from a stopped position and makes a relaxed dumb face as he doo wops notes and echoes the sentiment with his thumb on the steering wheel. "Boy, I'll tell you... the Moody Blues were underrated... "
My first stepfather would roll down his window at an intersection and tell the guy next to us that he was a jackass. There wasn't any music playing, because it was an older vehicle and the radio was never needed.
My mother may have played the radio when we took the car. We only took the car so that we could buy groceries. We drove from the country to Kleins grocer and sometimes we had two carts, and I always felt strange about that. Like, why are we buying so much food? We bought so much food because we were only allowed to go into town once every two weeks with my stepfather's permission. I would be rewarded with little debbie star crunches. Not a box of 12 to last 2 days... A box of 12 to last two weeks for all three or four of us.
My escape was scooping a bottle of powdered gatorade and licking it slowly out of the scoop in front of the television afterschool. There were 7 channels. Scooby Doo was the real deal.
Stepfathers have nothing to do with the struggle I am facing right now. I only mention them because.. they do matter in the scheme of processing wtf is going down here.
My younger brother is .. well... my little brother is very ill. I don't like to say ill. I don't even like to say what his affliction is, because if I say it... then no one knows wtf I am talking about and even if they do-- they have no fucking idea what its like to deal with a loved one who suffers it, let alone try to relate in any real terms....
I am a mother.
I am a ripped apart mother.
I replay images of my daughter touching me with practiced reassurance to let me know that she is my only daughter and I am her only mother. She is miles away, with her father as we institute this visitation for the first time with me losing since a dissolution.
She is amazing.
I know that I have done the right thing to be here. I cannot imagine being without what I have gained, but every day that passes seems to bring with it haystacks of loss that needle me with incredible guilt.
I maintain at a job where boys a decade younger than I exercise their "superior" fine dining talons and humiliating me is par for the course. It's not an easy surge for them, because I will scrape the walls of any sewer if everyone can breathe easier and I will pretend that a beet is a radish if it means someone else will feel bigger for just one second in a day, because I know what it means to feel as if you have lost.
I received a fortune today when I ate. "Your love of Life can Carry you Through any circumstance."
What will my hate do for me?
With a daughter thousands of miles away, and a young brother who depends on me because the entire Universe is trying to capture and torture him.. (and I do mean the entire universe).. it's hard to swallow a bite.
I can though. I can swallow, and I continue to bite, because I have you.
Tomorrow.. Anger and the usual, until I talk to you or see you.
Do what you will with my memory. Everyone will know it was yours to do with whatever you wanted by the time it matters.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Handsome Thoughts
I think that one of my favorite things to learn about a new friend, is that they don't have children... because their dogs are their children. You know. Because having a dog is the same as having a child.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Leonidas
A thunderous applause leads our hero down.
like a wrestler with harder drives than the road allows
take my love--raw edges and all, with romantic abandon,
into the catacombs.
I will not only allow him to hate you, but I encourage him to destroy you .
and not an invalid swallow inside his throat, could scratch it like I will.
I advised you. Just then.
like a wrestler with harder drives than the road allows
take my love--raw edges and all, with romantic abandon,
into the catacombs.
I will not only allow him to hate you, but I encourage him to destroy you .
and not an invalid swallow inside his throat, could scratch it like I will.
I advised you. Just then.
Friday, May 23, 2008
I can't put my finger on it.
The people who say certain other people shouldn't write, are fucking dumb-as-shit A Holes.
Topic change.
Next, you'll be mowing down whole tribes, but first you hunt the community.
That's original and you can eat your own proud shit over it, all fucking day.
Topic change.
You'll roll over and play dead. And I will revel in that fantasy with you.
Am I angry? Is that poetry? Is it news? Is it, I'm sick to fucking death of being the cause of every inch of pain around me for miles on end? Bet on it... and what would you bet on it, by the way?
You want to drive me to a reaction?
I would die in torture before throwing out a fraction of the bile you did yesterday in the name of loving him, but I'm not you.
And you sure as fuck ain't me, Sugar.
Cry over that. Its all you'll get.
Topic change.
Next, you'll be mowing down whole tribes, but first you hunt the community.
That's original and you can eat your own proud shit over it, all fucking day.
Topic change.
You'll roll over and play dead. And I will revel in that fantasy with you.
Am I angry? Is that poetry? Is it news? Is it, I'm sick to fucking death of being the cause of every inch of pain around me for miles on end? Bet on it... and what would you bet on it, by the way?
You want to drive me to a reaction?
I would die in torture before throwing out a fraction of the bile you did yesterday in the name of loving him, but I'm not you.
And you sure as fuck ain't me, Sugar.
Cry over that. Its all you'll get.
Make your way.
Sometimes you have to be beaten within an inch of your life, to appreciate the days when you just get your face kicked in.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
gulls
It takes forever for the sun to set.
There are no street lamps. No stars. No moon. Just blackness. In the distance I can see a red light and a green light at the entrance to the harbor set out for navigation. I catch glimmers off of the water when a cloud ends, until the one right behind it takes that glimmer away.
It would be peaceful were it not for the sounds of a riot taking place out in the blackness. Hundreds of birds from different families are talking to each other. Fighting over resources, fighting for dominance, fighting for a mate, fighting with their babies… Fighting. Their intensity is so strong, that I wonder if they couldn't just kill me if I crashed their tribal council this evening. If I just walked up the beach, with my pupils fully dilated and me still stumbling through the ebony, then out into the frigid sea-- right into the thick of them, what would they do to me? What would I allow? Would I have any control at all?
I heard wolves the other night. No chance of seeing them because it was so dark. A wolf howl seems to come from no one direction and limits itself to no harmony. It goes right through you and you feel it as much as you hear it. Every howl has a visual story accompanying it. The sound immediately arrests you and you want to hear more. The hungry choir stabs at your illuminated shadow in the doorway and you can make out nothing before you. So beautiful. So eerie.
When I turn to go back inside, I am like a child again. Chilled when I turn my back, I close the door quickly--as the heart races. It seems an eternity with the Unknown screaming rapidly toward my defiance, and I leave the night to work its potent magic without me, before the sun comes to radiate resolutions and exchange pains.
There are no street lamps. No stars. No moon. Just blackness. In the distance I can see a red light and a green light at the entrance to the harbor set out for navigation. I catch glimmers off of the water when a cloud ends, until the one right behind it takes that glimmer away.
It would be peaceful were it not for the sounds of a riot taking place out in the blackness. Hundreds of birds from different families are talking to each other. Fighting over resources, fighting for dominance, fighting for a mate, fighting with their babies… Fighting. Their intensity is so strong, that I wonder if they couldn't just kill me if I crashed their tribal council this evening. If I just walked up the beach, with my pupils fully dilated and me still stumbling through the ebony, then out into the frigid sea-- right into the thick of them, what would they do to me? What would I allow? Would I have any control at all?
I heard wolves the other night. No chance of seeing them because it was so dark. A wolf howl seems to come from no one direction and limits itself to no harmony. It goes right through you and you feel it as much as you hear it. Every howl has a visual story accompanying it. The sound immediately arrests you and you want to hear more. The hungry choir stabs at your illuminated shadow in the doorway and you can make out nothing before you. So beautiful. So eerie.
When I turn to go back inside, I am like a child again. Chilled when I turn my back, I close the door quickly--as the heart races. It seems an eternity with the Unknown screaming rapidly toward my defiance, and I leave the night to work its potent magic without me, before the sun comes to radiate resolutions and exchange pains.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
AAOx4
I bought a house on an Aleutian Island, on the first island if heading south down the chain from the mainland. I bought that motherfucking house.
Midnight and Dusk along with Tonight, crash delivered to me, a pitch black entry way. I peered out into the heaviest of ebonies..
I war intensely for keeping the glow within me going steady but still I find myself rapidly growing dim.
Drowning out the thud of an exposed and defeated tell-tale heart... I sacrificed my turn at Oblivian, under that blackness and I reluctantly headed out into that chill, because I was not prepared to be grateful if I had to wait around another 8 million eons and play cozy.
Voices coming from the cave behind me were swallowed into the fog as I listened and wished them each an eternal well.
I delicately fingered my way along that poorly illuminated razor wire into the safety of night. I didn't care who had sights or illumination on me. I do constantly imagine that I am in your salvage yard, and that's all I am willing to give on it right now.
Rust was my favorite color and navy blue.
I like the way light could always break through corrosion, and how the blues appear to be never overtaken unless by their own.
There is no love and no shade as volatile.
Now, every color and every silence drags behind it a Universal army of
Embers from you.
Embers of you.
You.
Midnight and Dusk along with Tonight, crash delivered to me, a pitch black entry way. I peered out into the heaviest of ebonies..
I war intensely for keeping the glow within me going steady but still I find myself rapidly growing dim.
Drowning out the thud of an exposed and defeated tell-tale heart... I sacrificed my turn at Oblivian, under that blackness and I reluctantly headed out into that chill, because I was not prepared to be grateful if I had to wait around another 8 million eons and play cozy.
Voices coming from the cave behind me were swallowed into the fog as I listened and wished them each an eternal well.
I delicately fingered my way along that poorly illuminated razor wire into the safety of night. I didn't care who had sights or illumination on me. I do constantly imagine that I am in your salvage yard, and that's all I am willing to give on it right now.
Rust was my favorite color and navy blue.
I like the way light could always break through corrosion, and how the blues appear to be never overtaken unless by their own.
There is no love and no shade as volatile.
Now, every color and every silence drags behind it a Universal army of
Embers from you.
Embers of you.
You.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
sea monster I
There are things about me that I have yet to discover.
In the past year I feel as though I have been all around the planet
swathed in clear & gauzy duct tape
treading muddy waters with heavy salt on the lips
keeping me and holding me hard against riding the waves
deaf to the rush of violence around me
every action peeled out is a thunderous sound-off
of richly technical eye witness.
Not quite drowning but sickeningly sure of the meter of every inhalation.
Seeing but not hearing the tentacles of enormously brave and destitute creatures beating
and battering static blue hued and vacant civilizations beneath a storm of torrid tides
just off of the shoreline... the jagged edges that smoothly outline my stabbingly desperate embrace, mean nothing-even if beautiful. Though my perimeter could be cried out as horrible when activated, at least it is certainly fragile. Inside, I am not truly terrible. I am soft. I am comfortable. I am sitting at the fire of my will. I am sure.
The creatures, their battle and their targets... are all my own. My very own. I call them.
Every exhalation is a drawn out pain that threatens each peace and me as it strokes into slumber the paranoid beast--with careful and crude tenderness... sleep. forget. die. and never return.
My God, My hope, My Word... and their dashed and peppered muscular atrophy grow imaginary limbs and pierce the sky with red red arms... in my head.
In pieces and eternally restless.. regretfully weakest...
I move with the sway. I step aside against the tide and it still goes right through me. I scan the horizon for landmarks. I prepare to die in my sleep, (though not from flooding) so that tomorrow I will be reborn-- after a night of battle in nightmares.
Fuck the ride. I lived to drown in this. I die with every dive but for every night that I have to sleep without you tucked deeply into my side
I rage and I kill and I fly heavy handed on heartbreaking rewind
into wall after wall after wall after wall believing that time will for once be kind and find me again, forever in your grace. Wrapped up in your perfect pulse and enveloped in your divine skeleton, I am forced alive and to wretching a distinct perfume from every pore. All the seconds I am given to convince your every cell, I run from, afraid of the last moments we will share. I am a factory for you.
Here I sit around the bonfire and dank comfort--fearing the blade of invaders--holding hand wrought spoons to the salty lips of our babes... swallowed by cottonwood smoke, and waiting for you under the weight of every last universal disaster.
I will take bullets and faithfully return to your chamber.
You are the roots in my clouded sky.
In the past year I feel as though I have been all around the planet
swathed in clear & gauzy duct tape
treading muddy waters with heavy salt on the lips
keeping me and holding me hard against riding the waves
deaf to the rush of violence around me
every action peeled out is a thunderous sound-off
of richly technical eye witness.
Not quite drowning but sickeningly sure of the meter of every inhalation.
Seeing but not hearing the tentacles of enormously brave and destitute creatures beating
and battering static blue hued and vacant civilizations beneath a storm of torrid tides
just off of the shoreline... the jagged edges that smoothly outline my stabbingly desperate embrace, mean nothing-even if beautiful. Though my perimeter could be cried out as horrible when activated, at least it is certainly fragile. Inside, I am not truly terrible. I am soft. I am comfortable. I am sitting at the fire of my will. I am sure.
The creatures, their battle and their targets... are all my own. My very own. I call them.
Every exhalation is a drawn out pain that threatens each peace and me as it strokes into slumber the paranoid beast--with careful and crude tenderness... sleep. forget. die. and never return.
My God, My hope, My Word... and their dashed and peppered muscular atrophy grow imaginary limbs and pierce the sky with red red arms... in my head.
In pieces and eternally restless.. regretfully weakest...
I move with the sway. I step aside against the tide and it still goes right through me. I scan the horizon for landmarks. I prepare to die in my sleep, (though not from flooding) so that tomorrow I will be reborn-- after a night of battle in nightmares.
Fuck the ride. I lived to drown in this. I die with every dive but for every night that I have to sleep without you tucked deeply into my side
I rage and I kill and I fly heavy handed on heartbreaking rewind
into wall after wall after wall after wall believing that time will for once be kind and find me again, forever in your grace. Wrapped up in your perfect pulse and enveloped in your divine skeleton, I am forced alive and to wretching a distinct perfume from every pore. All the seconds I am given to convince your every cell, I run from, afraid of the last moments we will share. I am a factory for you.
Here I sit around the bonfire and dank comfort--fearing the blade of invaders--holding hand wrought spoons to the salty lips of our babes... swallowed by cottonwood smoke, and waiting for you under the weight of every last universal disaster.
I will take bullets and faithfully return to your chamber.
You are the roots in my clouded sky.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Demolition
The salt in the air has corroded every vehicle here. Each house sinks into the Earth at alarming speeds that the eye can see. Each year an inch or two of drenched and wind battered wood is swallowed into the ground. The owners of all these eyes who stand in front of all of these houses just watch the mud grow up the wall. Further away from the sky and working into a grave, they sleep at night.
For the years that I have lived here, I have struggled with the depression of the villagers. I have held my head up high and tried to bring light and warmth and generosity and humor into their homes. I gave what I could here. People say that they can't read me. Say that I always appeared to be content. How they can say this is easy, if they had no fucking clue who I was at all. I was despairing in my own home and behind my own eyes and under the same sky.. again.
I have never in my life made a decision or a move that carried with it such a gigantic fucking swell of effect, with the exception maybe of creating a life.
What I do here now, what I move forward to accomplish, run fast to receive, tear through years of memories and toss aside to capture IS something that I refuse to let escape me. I risk everything, but that everything in perspective-held against this amazing love is nothing at all. I do feel out of control and out of my mind at times. If I can just last long enough to fall into pieces in your arms, then I have done what I needed to do. What I always needed to do.
I have been taking pathetic swings to carve my way through a solid mass of greedy and selfish fuckers for a long time now. So long that I do it without thinking or recognizing that I have remained on the frontlines of this war for far too long. Now that I can communicate, can feel what I need to feel, can give what I need to give and be held completely captivated and in awe of a man I could never let go of... I'm not swinging any more, I am kicking that shit down. And as the bodies throw themselves around before me in a display of feigned loss and conceit, I will step over them and keep my eyes on you. Moving faster and closer to nights in our bed, in our house, in our city, in our love and allowing nothing to stop me from being yours.
For the years that I have lived here, I have struggled with the depression of the villagers. I have held my head up high and tried to bring light and warmth and generosity and humor into their homes. I gave what I could here. People say that they can't read me. Say that I always appeared to be content. How they can say this is easy, if they had no fucking clue who I was at all. I was despairing in my own home and behind my own eyes and under the same sky.. again.
I have never in my life made a decision or a move that carried with it such a gigantic fucking swell of effect, with the exception maybe of creating a life.
What I do here now, what I move forward to accomplish, run fast to receive, tear through years of memories and toss aside to capture IS something that I refuse to let escape me. I risk everything, but that everything in perspective-held against this amazing love is nothing at all. I do feel out of control and out of my mind at times. If I can just last long enough to fall into pieces in your arms, then I have done what I needed to do. What I always needed to do.
I have been taking pathetic swings to carve my way through a solid mass of greedy and selfish fuckers for a long time now. So long that I do it without thinking or recognizing that I have remained on the frontlines of this war for far too long. Now that I can communicate, can feel what I need to feel, can give what I need to give and be held completely captivated and in awe of a man I could never let go of... I'm not swinging any more, I am kicking that shit down. And as the bodies throw themselves around before me in a display of feigned loss and conceit, I will step over them and keep my eyes on you. Moving faster and closer to nights in our bed, in our house, in our city, in our love and allowing nothing to stop me from being yours.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Not functional
The end the end the end the end.
I am staring at this screen. Wanting to vent. Wanting to spill my black frothy guts all over the fucking 2 dimensional gulf that stares back at me with no dimension at all. I want to rip every chord out of every wall attached to every piece of hard and inhuman technology and cut it into thousands of pieces with my teeth until I have decapitated myself in agonizing.... ineptitude.
I swim in a sea that makes no bones when I am at "home". I flatly deliver goods and sentiments. I comb hair and clean up chocolate milk. I revamp a piece of paper that terminates 10 years of life with someone, and then I make noodles and pick up crayons, and cut off 4 inches of her hair... Her first hair cut, and I just bunch it all up in a ponytail and cut it off. I pictured her first hair cut to be so much different than that. I could have stopped myself. Could have built it all up high on
ceremony. Could have taken pictures. Could have had a scrap book ready with easter colored ribbons on the edge of a clean table. Not a table covered in things to distract her as I drag myself through this hell of divide and conquer bullshit that no one should have to endure.
But now, away, I can imagine laying beside a fire in the rain. Listening to each drop sizzle and evaporate, watching each drop steam and disappear, and the fire never dies and it never stops raining.
Until about ten seconds ago.
I am staring at this screen. Wanting to vent. Wanting to spill my black frothy guts all over the fucking 2 dimensional gulf that stares back at me with no dimension at all. I want to rip every chord out of every wall attached to every piece of hard and inhuman technology and cut it into thousands of pieces with my teeth until I have decapitated myself in agonizing.... ineptitude.
I swim in a sea that makes no bones when I am at "home". I flatly deliver goods and sentiments. I comb hair and clean up chocolate milk. I revamp a piece of paper that terminates 10 years of life with someone, and then I make noodles and pick up crayons, and cut off 4 inches of her hair... Her first hair cut, and I just bunch it all up in a ponytail and cut it off. I pictured her first hair cut to be so much different than that. I could have stopped myself. Could have built it all up high on
ceremony. Could have taken pictures. Could have had a scrap book ready with easter colored ribbons on the edge of a clean table. Not a table covered in things to distract her as I drag myself through this hell of divide and conquer bullshit that no one should have to endure.
But now, away, I can imagine laying beside a fire in the rain. Listening to each drop sizzle and evaporate, watching each drop steam and disappear, and the fire never dies and it never stops raining.
Until about ten seconds ago.
Monday, January 14, 2008
sweet
I just ate an after dinner mint.
I wondered what it would be like to have you feed it to me
with your mouth.
I wondered what it would be like to have you feed it to me
with your mouth.
The Water
I have spent my life on a shoreline.
Creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans... standing at the edge of the bath. Each time I am with the water, I am filled with a sort of peace and sadness. I am always putting my hands in. Sometimes seeing my reflection when the water is calm. Sometimes just looking into it and seeing all of the tiny residents of life float with stagnant or wild currents.
I have been looking for you in the water forever.
I am a desert without you.
Creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans... standing at the edge of the bath. Each time I am with the water, I am filled with a sort of peace and sadness. I am always putting my hands in. Sometimes seeing my reflection when the water is calm. Sometimes just looking into it and seeing all of the tiny residents of life float with stagnant or wild currents.
I have been looking for you in the water forever.
I am a desert without you.
notes
… I will go in any door with you and I won’t leave the room until you do.…
How could I have let myself go so badly? Out in every direction, I went, but truly in no direction at all… Unless, “down” is on the compass, and it was.
I’m still down here, but my legs grew back, my arms returned to me, and someone up “there” is shining the brightest light through the thickest layers of debris…( keeping you from me. )
We started digging our way to each other, many times over the years, and here we are. Finally. Battered from our private hells, we are elated to know the other. Like none and beyond all others. Now we are one puzzle. And we handle each others pieces like we have handled our own all these years, except now we do it with loving and instantly expert extra hands…
a steady heart beat…
and
eyes that give me the fucking Universe.
If we read our love letters in fifty years, will we laugh about concepts like “email” and “planes” and other shit? We might, I concluded. And then we would hold hands and kiss
Life is so much easier when you never change your mind and can live perfectly high in the meaningless wing span of a falling jetliner…and look down on all the places you would rather be as you crash at my feet.
And that’s pretty much what I have to say about judging me to anyone who would be bored and crazy enough to even give a fuck about anything that I do or believe.
Let me just SHOW you what I fucking believe.
How could I have let myself go so badly? Out in every direction, I went, but truly in no direction at all… Unless, “down” is on the compass, and it was.
I’m still down here, but my legs grew back, my arms returned to me, and someone up “there” is shining the brightest light through the thickest layers of debris…( keeping you from me. )
We started digging our way to each other, many times over the years, and here we are. Finally. Battered from our private hells, we are elated to know the other. Like none and beyond all others. Now we are one puzzle. And we handle each others pieces like we have handled our own all these years, except now we do it with loving and instantly expert extra hands…
a steady heart beat…
and
eyes that give me the fucking Universe.
If we read our love letters in fifty years, will we laugh about concepts like “email” and “planes” and other shit? We might, I concluded. And then we would hold hands and kiss
Life is so much easier when you never change your mind and can live perfectly high in the meaningless wing span of a falling jetliner…and look down on all the places you would rather be as you crash at my feet.
And that’s pretty much what I have to say about judging me to anyone who would be bored and crazy enough to even give a fuck about anything that I do or believe.
Let me just SHOW you what I fucking believe.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Fuck this house.
So angry so angry so angry.
Wipe the face of the Earth with me.
Drag my blood through the streets after
they have carried me away
from the heavy control of your pounded out demands
to spare the street cleaners from scraping
my flesh and my choices from cobbles with spoons
they beg you to stop
to spare them the labor of cleaning up
As it stands, they could haul me with invisible shovels
Into invisible carts pulled by invisible hands
to invisible ends.
I'm fucking sorry.
Wipe the face of the Earth with me.
Drag my blood through the streets after
they have carried me away
from the heavy control of your pounded out demands
to spare the street cleaners from scraping
my flesh and my choices from cobbles with spoons
they beg you to stop
to spare them the labor of cleaning up
As it stands, they could haul me with invisible shovels
Into invisible carts pulled by invisible hands
to invisible ends.
I'm fucking sorry.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Subterranean
Though flowers do not readily fossilize
Two children turned to stone
Slipping from mothers' birthing grip
Covered over time
found wandering, malnourished, and alone
when the rocks broke into flight.
In the black black blackness
Amidst silent screaming and heavy footsteps
We conjure a calm breeze to sweep the mine fields around us
We glow electric on the horizon
And though nothing can be seen by any living creature
The dawn is clear to us
We stand on the horizon.
Allowing for no lights, save for one to pass through
The brightest, the most glorious, most penetrating rays and waves
lapping over every ditch.
every forest
every thing
and washing this temple
This altar in an unforgiving tide
We stand holding the other and laughing in a torrential pour of stunned acceptance
our arms, our endless branches
to hold ourselves above water
and close.
You flew across the channels and brought me to my knees
You wrapped me up in endless palettes of midnight
rested me on the stalks of the strongest flowers
and with power performed
Affection of a latticed ball held within and outside of me
One textile. One surface. One Purpose.
Ribbons of blood
Clusters of stars
Endless Altars
Highways of arteries
stopping at every intersection
to connect.
Through a riotous underbrush with a rushing in our ears
the madness slips further away
and we find a cool dry place
to cover everything night after night
Emerging, never.
Lined up in your gaze
is a battalion of saints
that elevates my brigade and shares your fire
In these sticks
stream billions of threadlike hairs
soaked through and served with gold
Laying quiet like thousands of nights before
but this time, with our bridge to bridge
we will live
for thousands here on and cross between each other
10 million crossings
until every last ounce of time is gone
A trembling ground
A severed sky
A flood and a fire
moved rock to rock
across a cracked and bleeding landscape to
rest against you
exhale
and move no more.
Two children turned to stone
Slipping from mothers' birthing grip
Covered over time
found wandering, malnourished, and alone
when the rocks broke into flight.
In the black black blackness
Amidst silent screaming and heavy footsteps
We conjure a calm breeze to sweep the mine fields around us
We glow electric on the horizon
And though nothing can be seen by any living creature
The dawn is clear to us
We stand on the horizon.
Allowing for no lights, save for one to pass through
The brightest, the most glorious, most penetrating rays and waves
lapping over every ditch.
every forest
every thing
and washing this temple
This altar in an unforgiving tide
We stand holding the other and laughing in a torrential pour of stunned acceptance
our arms, our endless branches
to hold ourselves above water
and close.
You flew across the channels and brought me to my knees
You wrapped me up in endless palettes of midnight
rested me on the stalks of the strongest flowers
and with power performed
Affection of a latticed ball held within and outside of me
One textile. One surface. One Purpose.
Ribbons of blood
Clusters of stars
Endless Altars
Highways of arteries
stopping at every intersection
to connect.
Through a riotous underbrush with a rushing in our ears
the madness slips further away
and we find a cool dry place
to cover everything night after night
Emerging, never.
Lined up in your gaze
is a battalion of saints
that elevates my brigade and shares your fire
In these sticks
stream billions of threadlike hairs
soaked through and served with gold
Laying quiet like thousands of nights before
but this time, with our bridge to bridge
we will live
for thousands here on and cross between each other
10 million crossings
until every last ounce of time is gone
A trembling ground
A severed sky
A flood and a fire
moved rock to rock
across a cracked and bleeding landscape to
rest against you
exhale
and move no more.
Sailing Stones and Mutant Love and children in a forest... The same forest?
So I have really been visualizing these sailing stones lately. I thought it would be cool to start putting them in my art somehow. Maybe even a series of sailing stones. So, I drew this sketch. It shows various sailing stone paths... Of course my perspective is total crap, but I think you see. And also... I kind of like the idea as a tattoo... I also drew the two mutants with inner children looking through holes in a tree that joins them all.. or out of a window... But I still like the idea of the two mutants, and the two children. I fucked up and made it dark between the larger one's heads and covered up the leaves or tree that was implied there.
blah blah blah...more blinding blizzards
I don't want to fight anymore. Sometimes I feel like I am walking in a daze. Totally confused. Not knowing what is coming. Lost in this gigantic shitstorm. AT the mercy of the most impossible emotional upheaval that I have ever suffered. In love and tortured. Completely tortured. And through all of this, I am trying to say goodbye to people. Trying to make them understand me, but everytime I open the door, I get a knife to the chest. Every invitation to dialogue sees me taking jabs. So I sit and look at the face. Look at the painful look in the eyes, and I have to shut down. I can't talk if we are going to talk about how I am leaving and how it is the most fucked up thing on the planet that has ever been done. Talk about how we have a daughter and we won't be living in the same town. Won't be able to just drive over and pick her up some weekend or whenever we feel like. She will be growing without one of us, forever now. And that is entirely my doing. Because, everyone else would have been just fine to live out this existence here. And to get through it, I have to be monumentally devoid of fucking emotion, and then everyone thinks I am a total cocksmoker. Seems like, here, that if I am maintaining then I must not be feeling anything, so it's time to poush buttons and make me cry. Because apparantly when I cry, that means I am feeling something, and then someone gets the opportunity to try and make me feel better by trying to hold me and tell me it's okay to cry. IT makes me sick. It all makes me so sick.
Slowly the house is emptying itself of my property.
She came to me in the kitchen and said, "Mama, Daddy's heart is broken."
He swears he didn't teach her that. Says he doesn't know where she learned it.
And I am so sick of hearing about how he is really worried about me. That is a fucked up head game sort of thing to say. Worried? Like all the years I was turning to shit before your eyes and you just kept on keeping on because you were getting everything you fucking wanted out of me? Worried like that?
And then there is my love.
Swollen and battered lost in this sea. Desperate to find its way home in this epic storm and sometimes the light is on, and sometimes it is off. But I will track ice in pitch black to make it there. Count on it.
Slowly the house is emptying itself of my property.
She came to me in the kitchen and said, "Mama, Daddy's heart is broken."
He swears he didn't teach her that. Says he doesn't know where she learned it.
And I am so sick of hearing about how he is really worried about me. That is a fucked up head game sort of thing to say. Worried? Like all the years I was turning to shit before your eyes and you just kept on keeping on because you were getting everything you fucking wanted out of me? Worried like that?
And then there is my love.
Swollen and battered lost in this sea. Desperate to find its way home in this epic storm and sometimes the light is on, and sometimes it is off. But I will track ice in pitch black to make it there. Count on it.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Golden Death Ray
Today I woke up, and checked the house for him. Wondered if I should get in the car and go check the snowbanks for him. Decided to lay down with my daughter but I couldn't sleep. I wake up at the same time every day, regardless of whether or not I have had enough sleep, because I am 3 hours behind my future and every second matters. Sometimes I wake up feeling fine. Sometimes I wake up feeling like shit, and I don't want to live another day like this, in this life.. this new and totally fucked up reality that there is no planning for. No defense of.
I can handle it most mornings, I think. At least that's how it starts. The days start with me handling it, and then slowly... the cars pile up, the bodies present themselves all over again, and survivors wander the wreckage barely alive and completely devastated like they do for days on end in my head...
And once again, realizing what has happened here, the smoke clears and these zombies fashion torches out of the sea of lost loved limbs around their battered feet, raise their dead souls high and set them alight with the fires of Hell that I have flash flooded their homes with... and they scream at me to freeze!
And they come after me not knowing what they will do to me when they find me, but knowing that when they do find me... They will make it hurt and they will make me pay. I will owe until I have bled and bruised my way back to the top again, where everyone wins but me. Today is like yesterday.
"I worry about you. I really worry about you."
"Don't you have any guilt?"
"I hope you know what you are doing..."
"I hope you know what you are doing..." (You have a daughter version)
"Will you one day explain to me, what happened here?"
"What are you going to do for money?"
"I don't want the sole responsibility."
"I could make this go nicely, or I could make this go badly."
"So, you have it all going on?" (falling apart? enjoying it?)
"I know how you are. You are a nurturer. Will you get what you need?" (Suddenly it matters Mix)
"We always said, if we ever left here, that it would cost a fortune to ship our lives out of here." (I think that what it costs you to leave me, is fucking hysterical... save the receipts, baby. )
"I hate to see you this way.. " (with the brick wall in front of your eyes.)
"I mean, you don't even know this guy."
"How do you know he's okay?"
I don't wish things had gone differently, because every day I honestly come upon the definition of who the fuck I am amidst an unhealthy and crazy kind of forest fire where everyone escapes but and because of me. And if that's the worst thing that can happen to me in a day, then I am doing okay, and everyone else was lucky. As usual I am only in the way.
I do know who I am. I pretend that I don't. I pretend that I don't to protect people. When people tell me that they don't understand me, I say, "No shit. Join the club." (Chuckles.) This doesn't mean that I am not dying for them to come back to me and fucking relate...
But I know who the fuck I am. I know that I have been dying a slow spiritual death since the day I was fucking born. It was my fate to end up however the fuck I will end up and however the fuck I have found myself here... today, a day just like yesterday... But full of a hope... the likes I never had access to.
I have been looking for some kind of golden death ray to bathe me in a warmth of understanding and deliver me from the fucking pain I have endured living on this Earth as the person that I am.. with the heart that I have and the guts that I am at least fucking willing to show, and take the fucking load of laundry for the whole village upon my shoulders, to the river- to wash the blood and detritus from their slices of hardly perfect-critical of me-lives, and I still fucking apologize when I drop their heavy cargo from exhaustion on the way to their far-out homes.
Where is the love that spares me? Illuminate my path again. I am forever lost in finding you. Please don't hide anymore. Show yourself and trust me. I put everything on the line to be yours. Everything, and if that's too much... too bad. You won't be rid of me so easily, and you shouldn't keep me from you.
I am not the only thing that can save you, but I fight all night.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Album pages
Pages from an album my mother made. She is on the right with me in the bottom, and her twin is on the left bottom with me. I am holding the plastic and wire sculpture child I named jericho.... I once threw him out the window of the Axiom onto the ground below... and then I went and got him.
The top photo was a passport photo from I don't remember when. Not sure why my hat is allowed... The picture where I am pretty sick looking was when I was laid up with my broken leg.
Killing deer
I don't have much fucking left here. I can't listen to the music without crying.
I do remember a day when my mother and I were driving some 1980's model silver station wagon.. or maybe it was the orange honda civic, nonetheless, we were driving through the heavily wooded back roads where I grew up. It's funny how I remember the trees being thicker than they really are.. always. I wish they were thicker. A lush green mountain is not so lush up close. It is rough and jagged. When I last returned to my childhood home and drove the winding back road so that I could be enveloped in that velvety tunnel... there was no tunnel. The trees were thinned out and it felt barren.
A deer jumped out from my side of the car and we smashed into it.
It flew up and hit the windshield, busting it, just like I did when I was hit by an older model station wagon a decade later.
I don't remember too much about it after we hit it. I was that same little girl who woke up for the animals.
I imagine that I saw it's heart racing. It's eyes wild. Broken, mangled, out of it's depth and knowing it was going to die.
I can't truly guess what it was thinking laying there, under our human gaze and hysteria, stepping from our hideous death dealer to really elevate the terror in this creature's last moments.
But, honestly, I always imagine that it was on it's way to meet another deer. And that the other deer waited in a cool place by a creek, dreaming, dozing, worrying and despairing in that one spot in a grove between freeways and swamp and that they died there waiting for the other deer to return to them.
I do remember a day when my mother and I were driving some 1980's model silver station wagon.. or maybe it was the orange honda civic, nonetheless, we were driving through the heavily wooded back roads where I grew up. It's funny how I remember the trees being thicker than they really are.. always. I wish they were thicker. A lush green mountain is not so lush up close. It is rough and jagged. When I last returned to my childhood home and drove the winding back road so that I could be enveloped in that velvety tunnel... there was no tunnel. The trees were thinned out and it felt barren.
A deer jumped out from my side of the car and we smashed into it.
It flew up and hit the windshield, busting it, just like I did when I was hit by an older model station wagon a decade later.
I don't remember too much about it after we hit it. I was that same little girl who woke up for the animals.
I imagine that I saw it's heart racing. It's eyes wild. Broken, mangled, out of it's depth and knowing it was going to die.
I can't truly guess what it was thinking laying there, under our human gaze and hysteria, stepping from our hideous death dealer to really elevate the terror in this creature's last moments.
But, honestly, I always imagine that it was on it's way to meet another deer. And that the other deer waited in a cool place by a creek, dreaming, dozing, worrying and despairing in that one spot in a grove between freeways and swamp and that they died there waiting for the other deer to return to them.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Lyrics_pressure 1995
She lays on the table squirming
With doctors standing around.
With pressure like that
You'll need machines to pull it out.
To see the head
The whole family's been talking about.
Will it be catholic and everything we've dreamed about.
Nothing is working and nothing is sound.
In this or any town.
Who wears the pants, who's in command
Of a sinking ship
Where slaves are in demand.
With a home life like that you'll need
A wrecking ball to knock it down.
To bury the birthday parties
And the relatives dressed as clowns.
With a home life like that you'll need
a concussion to get it out.
Start the recovery early and thrash your head about.
Nothing is working and nothing is sound
In this or any town.
Horrible things and friends
You've known for half your life...
With an attitude like that, you'll need
imaginary friends
The kind who will ride through Hell
on your dream called "the end".
With an attitude like that, you'll need
A new improved shell
The kind that survives heat when you're
visiting Hell.
Nothing is working and nothing is sound
In this or any town.
Nothing is perfect and it's sucking you dry.
With a brain like that, you'll need
a van to haul it around.
Through the countryside, the mountains
and downtown.
With a brain like that, you'll need
a van to haul it around.
If you can make it float,
push it off to sea and do it now.
With a birthright like this, you'll need
a miracle to smooth things out.
The kind that makes you insane
So everythings alright.
With a birthright like this you'll need
And army to toe the line.
The kind that works for free and
has no concept of time.
With doctors standing around.
With pressure like that
You'll need machines to pull it out.
To see the head
The whole family's been talking about.
Will it be catholic and everything we've dreamed about.
Nothing is working and nothing is sound.
In this or any town.
Who wears the pants, who's in command
Of a sinking ship
Where slaves are in demand.
With a home life like that you'll need
A wrecking ball to knock it down.
To bury the birthday parties
And the relatives dressed as clowns.
With a home life like that you'll need
a concussion to get it out.
Start the recovery early and thrash your head about.
Nothing is working and nothing is sound
In this or any town.
Horrible things and friends
You've known for half your life...
With an attitude like that, you'll need
imaginary friends
The kind who will ride through Hell
on your dream called "the end".
With an attitude like that, you'll need
A new improved shell
The kind that survives heat when you're
visiting Hell.
Nothing is working and nothing is sound
In this or any town.
Nothing is perfect and it's sucking you dry.
With a brain like that, you'll need
a van to haul it around.
Through the countryside, the mountains
and downtown.
With a brain like that, you'll need
a van to haul it around.
If you can make it float,
push it off to sea and do it now.
With a birthright like this, you'll need
a miracle to smooth things out.
The kind that makes you insane
So everythings alright.
With a birthright like this you'll need
And army to toe the line.
The kind that works for free and
has no concept of time.
Tugging on a Tendril
I was trying to think of something that I know about myself right now, and I couldn't come up with a fucking thing. Not one thing. Total blank. I did think of one thing though. I sure know how to fuck something up in nuclear fucking proportions when I put my feeble mind to it.
I'm not anything fucking special here. I was stupid and shy as a little girl and I lived in my head. My friends were animals. My friends were the heroes in books. I didn't need to have tea parties where I would pull out dainty saucers and a teapot, going around a cardboard box for a table... serving toys and invisible visitors... I was constantly at a tea party in my head. My imagination was wild and jumped with abandon from topic to topic and equally from emotion to emotion.
I couldn't stand up for myself without crying or getting red faced. I liked being who I was when it slowly started to come to me, but I hated being looked at, and I have to be the one controlling the depth of my encounters, but I never went too far down. Never found myself here in this position that I am in. Completely at someone's fucking mercy. Crushed with the weight of my emotions and physically ill with loss and confusion and sickness. Complete love sickness.
I never had alot of friends. I just knew alot of people. Maybe for the reason I mentioned at the beginning. They can't think of one thing about me that means fuck all.
What am I feeling?
It doesn't matter at this point. I am feeling every fucking piece of pain on the planet right now. Every piece of pain that this horrordome has ever fucking bred and breast-fed and created in it's never ending legacy to produce nothing but said fucking pain... is what I feel right now.
I have not for one second yet, really inspected what I feel about my daughter in all of this. I haven't been able to address it.
And I won't start addressing it tonight. Don't get me wrong. Her existence motivates me and blesses me, and so I have to be strong to face that pummeling. Something I don't see myself being right now. I am losing my fucking mind... So to focus on the shit that truly fucking matters... is actually really hard.
I feel like this disgusting sea monster come to the shore, and throwing itself into the sun to feel warmth only to be stoned and pelted by beautiful but violent people from every direction. Driven back into the murk, staring at the lights of night time fiestas, tears make tracers of all the life I am missing. All of you that I am missing. I can't take it. I will float back to shore when everyone is passed out from revelry and warm myself on the sand near a neglected fire, careful to sleep lightly so that I may protect myself in the murk to live another... sad fucking day.
I'm not anything fucking special here. I was stupid and shy as a little girl and I lived in my head. My friends were animals. My friends were the heroes in books. I didn't need to have tea parties where I would pull out dainty saucers and a teapot, going around a cardboard box for a table... serving toys and invisible visitors... I was constantly at a tea party in my head. My imagination was wild and jumped with abandon from topic to topic and equally from emotion to emotion.
I couldn't stand up for myself without crying or getting red faced. I liked being who I was when it slowly started to come to me, but I hated being looked at, and I have to be the one controlling the depth of my encounters, but I never went too far down. Never found myself here in this position that I am in. Completely at someone's fucking mercy. Crushed with the weight of my emotions and physically ill with loss and confusion and sickness. Complete love sickness.
I never had alot of friends. I just knew alot of people. Maybe for the reason I mentioned at the beginning. They can't think of one thing about me that means fuck all.
What am I feeling?
It doesn't matter at this point. I am feeling every fucking piece of pain on the planet right now. Every piece of pain that this horrordome has ever fucking bred and breast-fed and created in it's never ending legacy to produce nothing but said fucking pain... is what I feel right now.
I have not for one second yet, really inspected what I feel about my daughter in all of this. I haven't been able to address it.
And I won't start addressing it tonight. Don't get me wrong. Her existence motivates me and blesses me, and so I have to be strong to face that pummeling. Something I don't see myself being right now. I am losing my fucking mind... So to focus on the shit that truly fucking matters... is actually really hard.
I feel like this disgusting sea monster come to the shore, and throwing itself into the sun to feel warmth only to be stoned and pelted by beautiful but violent people from every direction. Driven back into the murk, staring at the lights of night time fiestas, tears make tracers of all the life I am missing. All of you that I am missing. I can't take it. I will float back to shore when everyone is passed out from revelry and warm myself on the sand near a neglected fire, careful to sleep lightly so that I may protect myself in the murk to live another... sad fucking day.
Dominion
I am shattered into thousands of pieces, scattered across a dark and despairing lake.
My ghost is tearing through the damp and thick brush- illuminated in moonlight, I scramble and pant my way through the edges of the wild. Brambles and dead branches cut at my neo-ethereal flesh.
Separated from my soul, what's left of me climbs up the embankment and falls face -first into the lake, surrounded by cooling waters and a sweet
honeysuckle scent.
Lilly pads roll and sway with my treading. Everything flows through me and I have no skin. I have no organs. I have no bones.
My mouth hangs open in the water and a million organisms swig around inside.
I try not to afffect or disturb the surface of the water, so I can find my one thousand pieces that were scattered here.
Through sheet after sheet of light playing as far down as my toes, I see a shape far deeper that immediately fires at my heart and hits it every time.
And I begin to make out the edges around the shape and realize through bodies of perch and ferns, that all of my pieces lay scattered at your glowing golden feet. And you are carefully, picking them up, looking at each piece cautiously and gently making me whole again, occasionally resting to look up at me treading your waters and trying to breathe without you.
I have never been so terrified.
My ghost is tearing through the damp and thick brush- illuminated in moonlight, I scramble and pant my way through the edges of the wild. Brambles and dead branches cut at my neo-ethereal flesh.
Separated from my soul, what's left of me climbs up the embankment and falls face -first into the lake, surrounded by cooling waters and a sweet
honeysuckle scent.
Lilly pads roll and sway with my treading. Everything flows through me and I have no skin. I have no organs. I have no bones.
My mouth hangs open in the water and a million organisms swig around inside.
I try not to afffect or disturb the surface of the water, so I can find my one thousand pieces that were scattered here.
Through sheet after sheet of light playing as far down as my toes, I see a shape far deeper that immediately fires at my heart and hits it every time.
And I begin to make out the edges around the shape and realize through bodies of perch and ferns, that all of my pieces lay scattered at your glowing golden feet. And you are carefully, picking them up, looking at each piece cautiously and gently making me whole again, occasionally resting to look up at me treading your waters and trying to breathe without you.
I have never been so terrified.
Vomit
It's pretty difficult for me to vomit. I remember when I was maybe 17 or 18, some friends I was in a band with and I were trying to make fucked up videos to put to our "Industrial" music. We poured gasoline into the shape of a pentagram on the ground of some out of the way cul-de-sac out near Jersey Village and set it on fire. Of course. How original. We slowed the footage down and made the flames blue, and it was high contrast like lightning. It was beautiful but the production was shit. Incidentally the music was shit too. And those friendships turned to shit. And that whole decade was shit, just like this one is starting to be. But my point is that it's hard for me to vomit. Back in those days, I drank one or two bottles of ipecac syrup to make myself throw up so we could film it, and I couldn't do it, and then we had no ipecac left, and no one else could even try. Oh yeah, and I just vomited, but the amazing thing is that I don't care.
I am getting the fuck out of this life I have been living. A prisoner and a victim of my own doing. Always of my own doing. I want to rip out the whites of my eyes, and shove them onto the tallest fucking spear and wave the flag of my bloody surrender, while blood runs from my eyes as my heart pumps harder and harder, threatening to deafen me in my blindness. .. An I hope to fuck that I don't become deaf or that my ears are somehow damaged, which could throw my balance into a fucking unrecoverable Abyss and then I wouldn't be able to hold up the flag. And the other side would not see that I meant to stop fighting, and instead they would launch air, sea and ground attacks. And when the guys in space suits would come to check out the damage, and comb the radiated wasteland I was last standing on, they wouldn't find a scrap of me left, and the flag of my eyes would far be gone in the thick black hate of the war that had killed me.
I am getting the fuck out of this life I have been living. A prisoner and a victim of my own doing. Always of my own doing. I want to rip out the whites of my eyes, and shove them onto the tallest fucking spear and wave the flag of my bloody surrender, while blood runs from my eyes as my heart pumps harder and harder, threatening to deafen me in my blindness. .. An I hope to fuck that I don't become deaf or that my ears are somehow damaged, which could throw my balance into a fucking unrecoverable Abyss and then I wouldn't be able to hold up the flag. And the other side would not see that I meant to stop fighting, and instead they would launch air, sea and ground attacks. And when the guys in space suits would come to check out the damage, and comb the radiated wasteland I was last standing on, they wouldn't find a scrap of me left, and the flag of my eyes would far be gone in the thick black hate of the war that had killed me.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
I hate, but still I donate.
Rolling Meadows. I have seen them. When the grasses roll like waves on a contained ocean, and somewhere in the picture there is a young woman with long black hair blowing across her face, and maybe behind her you can see the blur of a wild horse prancing with burning nostrils to reach the barbed wire that lines the perimeter. What I choose to identify with changes constantly. The rolling grass, the wind that threatens to rip it up and transplant it, the human involved, and the trapped wild animal.. happy in it's domesticated knowledge to see the fence-line as a goal... as a reward... as a boundary that protects and controls the destiny of this beast, and when it gets so far, it stops and worries about food. Worries about hiding from lightning. Worries about how the eyes are on the side of the head and how the future is a complex compilation of defensive side-winding grips.
I miss lightning.
I don't need to eat.
My eyes are as they have always been.
A sea of rolling landscape will always be before me.
Will I ever eat horse head soup? Not unless I am dying and cannot live another day to know you, without it.
To live another day to know you, I will eat anything. I will eat myself slowly from fingertip to tongue, to see you breathe another day in my presence. I am already an organ donor, and baby, you have no idea how far I will go to give you my life.
I miss lightning.
I don't need to eat.
My eyes are as they have always been.
A sea of rolling landscape will always be before me.
Will I ever eat horse head soup? Not unless I am dying and cannot live another day to know you, without it.
To live another day to know you, I will eat anything. I will eat myself slowly from fingertip to tongue, to see you breathe another day in my presence. I am already an organ donor, and baby, you have no idea how far I will go to give you my life.
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