hop

And she's stone sober, none of these influences to blame. How can she explain the blueness, subtle, not quite lumbering on her, more like the heaviness of a grasshopper on her arm, though, a million grasshoppers, which is very different than one. One she could handle but it is the sheer scope of all of them at once that is challenging. Some people feel it more like a lead coat but for her it isn’t that massive. It is more like a shawl spun of silk yet laced with despondency. Sometimes she just cries and it comes from somewhere deep, so deep I wonder if its location is in another universe, another lifetime.

place

There was must and mildew on the walls. Checkers and zig-zags etched into the cement, dank wall, almost making it pretty. If not for the horror down here it would be alluring, mystical and enticing. There will be no mention of this place because of the rumors, because of the judgements. There is no love for those places deemed illogical and whimsical. Only the forget-me-nots and odd balls inhabit this inhabitable place. But I won’t apologize for its darkness. I refuse to paint my brush of blue along the wall. It is not meant to be altered. To do so would insult its journey and evolution. To at last separate ourselves from our senses means perhaps for one snuffed out moment, we can truly love.

be so

He landed here and instantly was dispersed, into life, into its fragments and pieces. He was cast into feathers and stone and liquid to know their forms, fundamentally apart yet metaphorically cloned. For it was empty space that found the stagnant bodies lying helplessly in the muddied bogs. They had lost hope of ever emerging again, as themselves. And crystalline patterns stuck to sidewalks in the big cities, never noticing the waste in their own back yards. He balanced gently on each blade of grass thinking it couldn’t be so, this state of free will.

Missing....

tones

Notes like anchors on my skin. Landing, digging in and making themselves at home in my psyche. They carry me, wind me around the linearity of people’s thoughts and then dump me, crassly, to free fall unapologetically back to earth. Why do we fear the aftermath so much? Why do we side step every cause of it, even when the cause may be joy? Is it due to its fleetingness, its mockingly transitory nature? Do we calculate all great things by their longevity then? But nothing exists beyond the now. Nothing is as it is, it is merely what it will become.

>

Patiently waiting to be wowed with sincerity and intent.

again

Hitting her again.

Like a blindside, but with some warning, because it was a regular thing, an irregularly occurring thing. Sometimes like ice water tossed at her other times like fire shoved down her throat. It was just that extreme and just that shocking.

Born with it she thinks, this ability, but others just thought she was bruised, internally, like a neglected Macintosh left to shrivel in the sun.

What was it this time that brought it on? a look? a tone? a scribbled word on a sticky pad, stuck to the fridge?

Everything was a sticky pad, sticking to her like fly tape. And just as messy, only she couldn’t throw herself away, or perhaps she could, there were bridges, and pink pills and firearms in the state of Texas, and heck, even the swamp out her back door but then she would be no different than fly tape, and although they were cousins, they weren’t blood brothers.

It would pass anyway, it always did, and then she’d have nothing left but regret and embarrassment for ever telling him she could talk to trees.

because

But she doesn't love them to own them, to expect things from them, to keep them, to marry them, to sleep with them, live with them, become them, she loves them because of who they are without her. She loves them like a fly on the wall. She loves them as if they had never met her. She loves them knowing she may never see them again, never speak to them, hold them, kiss them, become their lover, best friend, confidante. She loves them in a manner much like the shore welcomes the tide, graciously, patiently, without question or reservation, respecting and admiring the cycles and timing of processes. She loves them authentically, deeply, in confidence. And she will likely love them even after they’ve chosen someone else because love is not a set of shoes to be filled in succession. She'll likely love them after they, or her, disappear and move on because love is not a location. And she'll likely be the one who is left loving them in the end, when all others have stopped, because love is water not stone. And she doesn't expect them to understand because love, like most things worthy, lies precariously between not-quite-logical and not-quite-absurd.

loss

Grief so yielding of action. From him I wish to take it away but it is impossible with me here and him there. I just have to have it then in all its weightiness. Just have to see it through and believe he may reap the benefit, through space and time. The loss too is my loss however obscurely, however inconceivably so. Sadness has been the tide, stopped and reversed, never coming in, and now I’m terrified at its return. The wall then, not so impermeable as I had once thought. Still affected so intensely by another’s bereavement. How to crawl out of my own heart and still live. I think of him then, and hope the anguish swift and the mourning, restful, when there can be no rest.

fodder

Is there a point then if it isn’t the best? liked? understood?

If it hasn’t been cast in emeralds and strung around an impossibly thin, socialite of a woman?

Is the value then determined by the source who receives it? And if none? if one? if two? Is it the what that counts or the why?

Does anyone know the difference? Does anyone even care?

Most things of note get shot out into the world jet-like, propelled into the abyss, the eerily beautiful abyss, only to be caught on the wing of a plane, dragged back down to earth and left to flounder like a dying fish, so completely out of place, there, on the runway.

It becomes just like everything else; fodder for the masses, in their mediocre, impressionistic, catatonic state.

lurk

I saw it and I didn’t imagine it, he said, convincingly, like he’d hand over his shotgun if you could prove him wrong. He went on to describe it. Lights, like the fluorescents in the bars, neon and glowing, giving everything that ambrosial outline, descending and hovering a few feet above his head. He was a dismisser of folklore, of urban legends but since that night he was convinced his dead mother was lurking in the evergreen trees outside his shack.

slice

We are the labyrinth from which there is no exit. Every exit a shut door, chained, containing us in a hallway leading only deeper into our own neurosis. Desperate to climb out of our skulls yet with no head lamps we are left to spin, dizzily, until we tip. We simply cannot get far enough away from ourselves. Even flight to another solar system incapable of severing the bridge, stubborn, impressively constructed, between brain and thought.

porch

He appeared there again, like before, only this time it was pre-determined. His weakness had won him over and now here he was at her doorstep. But you can be anything you want the universe whispered. She just stared at the veins popping in her hands and knew she was closer to the dream.

smudge

It hangs on you, heavy, like an old wool coat, tiresome in most seasons, but even more so in the summer. It isn’t something you can’t live with, but living without it is cumbersome and confining. You want to shed it like some thick, weary skin, long past its prime. Many times you have tried, scrubbed yourself raw to rid the memories, zombified your brain with mindless distraction, edged yourself further away, physically, geographically, hoping it would expedite the exorcism. Intuitively though, you know it will unravel and dissipate more unobviously, in slow motion, like the melting of snow or the turning of leaves. You hate being where you are, in the middle of the undoing, wishing only to be at the end, looking back with objectivity, with wounds healed, with armor unkinked. Even when it has rolled over on itself and come to rest out of sight, there is still the punishing task to forget, to erase all traces of it. Your end becomes the missing fragment; a part of you, hopeful, free and loving, gone, forever, used up in that moment for good, bad, indecent, broken. It can’t ever be returned, merely replaced with whatever happens to exist at the time.

on being an empath

It is like being the feet of others, the skin, the heart. You go where they go, not literally, not physically, but subconsciously, emotionally. When they encase themselves in facades and beguiling masquerades you need not obey like the casual, distant observer, neatly oblivious to that strangers paradise. You instead shuffle non-threateningly off to the side, your intimate knowledge stowed respectfully. The shoestring subtleties loud, clanging in your brain, like some random code deciphered unconsciously with absolutely zero effort.

carnival

Helium balloons. Clown whores in the dark. Peanut brittle snapping teeth. Snow unrelenting, falling, falling, falling. Think of nothing. Think of something brilliant. Be intelligent. Kids seducing kids. Adults seducing kids. A beagle in the window. Be happy. Just be happy. Stop being so sensitive. Be abrasive. Dampness in the day. Money.

closed doors

Tiptoeing around, as if they are ice, thin, in the spring, about to crack. Moving here, there, dodging the reason why they have come.

I could crush you, her eyes say, but he doesn’t notice, because he’s breathing, in, out, deeper, full of what he has anticipated, of what he knows will unfold.

They want to exist there, aloft and frozen temporarily in the uncomplicated, the pure, the bliss. Skin, thoughts, merging into a moment soon to be just like the rest, over. He steps in, ready to shed his ego and she steps in, ready to make it happen. Lovers circling like insects upon some wanted ground, busy with intention, escaping time to see it through. So many looks, so much rawness tempered only by distance and soon it will cross into no man’s land. The place where rules dissolve and reason slides with the rain into the sewage hole.

Only the two of them now, drenched in one another, as close as close allows, becoming the whole of the part, the step in between, the lost and forgotten void, now buried in the sounds of surrender.

A note echoes, from an old, barely tuned piano; a haunting serenade of this beautiful transgression.

There is a smile, only it is not on her face. The deepest of emotion just below, out of sight from eyes, from wavering sensibilities and cracker-jack moralities.

All that is here stays here, except for that one bit; it swirls with the stodgy air and trails out the window into the street, the world going on in oblivion.

back

They confused her, wildly. In solitude the happiness came again, crept back in a joyous reunion.

blurb

We step on us marginal folk. Socks soaked through our rubber boots as the seasons change. Bread crumbs on our shirts and water rising from the drains.

dust child

Smiles, joy in motion, on the faces of them, hopeful, sly, mesmerizingly beautiful. They crawl into your heart and burrow in, implanting themselves so you can never forget, never erase their beings, busy bustling through their short life spans.

Flashes of them, barefoot, dust swirling up around them like the dance of the Sea Monster, long buried beneath the sands of drought.

They are so light, effervescent and without the sagging weight of a rampant and indigestible bias, throwing them down like iron anchors tied humorously to wood-carved canoes.

Wings with no bodies to transport, see-through eyes with no concealment or pretense or fear.

They are sunflowers glowing in a garden of snails, giving us a way in, a way we long ago traded for complacency, choosing instead a place for our feet, steady, predictable and familiar.

They show us, remind us, how life is powerful by nothing more than just being.

Willow

They laid her in the tall willowy grass. Off yellow in color, the grass and her hair. She had a smile on her face, peaceful and forgiving, as if all that had come to ruin was just then gelled back together. Broken hearts, shattered minds, itching psyches all restored, returned, realigned. People remember her sitting at a table staring out over a thousand puzzle pieces, a cup of tea always in reach, Patsy Cline in the background bringing sour and sweet together. ‘We are all angels before we die’ she used to say, as if she had been there and seen it already. As if she knew what she would be like the instant before she slipped away. It was all hearsay and gossip now. Her voice was merely the wind, blowing the blades from side to side as if communicating to us in some form of silent gesture. What can be taken from this day, so silent and still. Nothing can be taken, just as nothing can be given. It all is, as is and isn’t. She was here and now she is gone and yet she was never here and will someday be back. Heads bowed, in a circle, everyone was silent. Only the smoke rising from a man’s cigarette circled and motioned upward as if to say a final goodbye. 

cracks

Beats on barrels leaking old brew. Corn brooms sweeping into cracks their filth. They were toothless wonders with muscles like a plow-horse and the determination of the desperate. But it wasn’t desperation that moved them it was alienation. The sneers motivated them to dig deeper into their creepiness. We have no grounds for judgement when we too tread perilously on the fence of normalcy, of decency. The courage to exist at odds with the world in the world is to be admired. They had voices no one heard for we couldn’t get past their appearance; smeared in shit. The stench of them sent us screaming back into our cinnamon houses; sweet and classically unforgiving. So much easier on this side of the glass.

lark

Have I waited in vain?

Have I sloshed through puddles, dampened my pant cuffs, endured the icy sting of the cool autumn breeze, only to realize it was a lark? Only to arrive, sodden and befuddled for absolutely nothing. Will I have to swallow what I thought to be true like some fatalistic pill, sending me to the other side to wallow in my own self-pity?

Here, under the sulking Oak, I realize I am crazy, out of my mind insane, for thinking it would materialize, you, would materialize, out of thin air, dropped from the sky, or burst through the earth, below my shiny, wet, muddy rubber boots, to stand before me, real and perfect.

I am destined to be suspended, torturously, in a room created by myself, with no doors but with endless life. I will hang about uninjured, unharmed other than the cerebral infliction run deep and rampant. I will realize it is here, I am, within these four walls, and not where I think I am, slowly sinking into the sloshed-out ground at the corner of Mink and Mint.

Soon time will tire of me, will give up entirely, stop, and pin upon my damp lapel a little name badge scribbled with the words, never was.

If you do appear then, out of nowhere, you’ll read it and scatter, flee and run for your life, cause you yourself just became something and are not about to throw it away for this soggy girl standing lost-like in the rain.

winged

The season is brown and the trees naked. A few flies emerge from the entrapment of winter. I watch and wait for the flight of the winged, the songs of their cycles humming amidst the encroachment of summer. Life emerging yet already existing. Perfection amidst the blandness. All in its place and me, too, rightfully, yet the odd man out. Part of it all, yet in no way obvious or certain. Will and free thought making things distinctly less instinctual, yet increasingly more unproductive and benign.

stuck

He wasn't a man you noticed, but he was one you never forgot. He had the callousness to break you down but the charm to build you up. There was no warning; it was just too late. Had you been clairvoyant you wouldn't have ended up here in this rat's nest of a situation. Can't leave, can't stay. You swivel around like a bar stool rotating horny patrons. You don't notice his height until his arms are around you, tightly, tight enough to emphasize the 'aloneness' of your predicament. You wish you were anything but what you were; a maggot squirming from a wound, a scab flicked to the floor, a fly, dead and stuck to the screen door. How you could be a sane, respectable, intelligent woman stuck in this demoralizing reality is too confusing to digest. Instead you move with him, in step, in rhythm, hoping you might survive one more day. And if you do you'll dye your hair green to slip into the green wilderness. You'll dye your skin orange and slip into the pile of Clementines. You'll vow to become untraceable amongst all things colorful.

she

She wore a summer dress, quarter length to show her calfs. She was a woman trapped inside a girls body, knowing things she shouldn't. Knowing pain and grief and loss and irreverent truths. While others were giggling and cheerful she was despondently absent, sliding into the trench dug by the ruthless man, the lawless man, the slave, the pagan and the witch. Her skeletal's born of the past, out of burden, out of sin, out of entrapment and deceit. She picked daisies on daisy days even when daisy days were so few. And when they'd come she was reassured that it wasn't just a black hole of nothingness that brought her here. There was something else too, a speck of something brighter, warmer and uplifting. Like a unicorn followed her here to this earth, and it trailed her incognito, like a smile we know is there, underneath it all. Sometimes she'd ly in the dirt to prove there was no wrongdoing in being amiss. To the rest, she was weird and hopelessly unusual, nothing more than a colorless color. A simpleton to the simpletons. A brat to the brats.

so

So we are here. You there and me here. Unseen and Unknown. Privy to judgements and scrutiny of those who are strangers. Strangers we wish were lovers, were the friends we thought impossible. Searching for meaning, connection, acceptance. We walk around and around a crowded room and still go home alone. But that is ok. Alone is not lonely. Alone is the freedom to be with someone by choice, by intention. There is substance in what we decide will be full of substance. And beauty comes forth from a place inside that is already beautiful. Knowing one another takes a lifetime and a lifetime is merely these present moments added up.

birch

I knew I had found my way home by the one tree I knew and loved. It still stood there on the top of the hill. Set against the greenness of the grass underneath, it looked dead but it was only winter that's all. When the snow fell, landed and collected on the ground it would come alive though, in the black and white beauty that black and white is. So vivid and dreamy and Burton like. I expected a wiry little man to merge from its bark, cause he lived there, in the tree. It would explain the 'aliveness' of the birch, it would explain how I was convinced it spoke to me, with wisdom and reassurance.

unison

So cyclical our lives. Ending where we begin. Beginning where we end. Dust particles float past, dusting the sunbeam passing through the window next to me. And what will become of the time and space we consumed? Will the irises and marigolds intensify their colors because we slumbered too long and it is the only way to get us to see? Yes, we have exploited our greatest resource; life itself. A small particle of hope is sold to us at the cost of our clarity, our clairvoyance, because all of us know on some level we have been deceived, particularly by ourselves. Trading passion and purpose for complacency. I know what I see yet I fall in line, not so unlike those I detest. I silenced myself just like the others, in self-doubt and self-criticism and the hellish pursuit of something that is not real.

In unison clothed in faded jeans I watch them trot off across cement patio blocks, so seemingly content and optimistic. How we survive the infiltration and yet succumb to bee stings I don't quite understand. The unknown manifested lyrically rather than accurately or sensibly. Maybe there is no point, no bottom line other than striking a chord, affecting a stifled and rigid brain, a lost and forgotten sense of purpose. Fleeting moments like dominoes setting into motion a chain reaction that knocks us all over.