beautiful you, beautiful me

aren't we special?  please tell me we are special.  i don't want to die alone.  i want to die in arms clasped tightly.  i want to die under hot breath.  i want to die being held together and never being let go.  i want it to end softly and with great love.  aren't we special?  i think we must be.  you are the bits of me that escaped, that flew out in the corners of the world and sang to the most charming worldly clouds, who lived and loved and longed to come back me.  and i am the bits of you that escaped, that swam to the deepest trenches and serenaded the ancient creatures, who lived and loved and longed to come back to you.

i love you.  it's a strange thing.  love.  not what i expected.  not gushy.  not full of low lights and soft music.  not brilliant one liners.  not long pans across exposed torsos and close ups of dilated pupils and the sounds of bated breath.  no.  it is maple leaf covered roads in northern new hampshire and the sound of your guitar and the way my soul sways whenever i hear you sing.  i remember your lungs; i remember your hugs.  i remember being held tightly, transported to someplace where there is coalescence, where i felt altogether content and present. 

i miss you.  part of me run out and searching.  part of you run out and searching.  i put your letter close to my chest.  let your words hug me, clasp tightly around my body.  make me feel special.  make me ready to sleep a while.  sleep a while.  aren't we special?  how very beautiful we are.  beautiful you, beautiful me. 
 

the desk

a big, heavy desk has landed in my room.  an emu.  or perhaps something a little less clunky and a touch more regal.  an eagle.  or perhaps something less Americana and coined.  an albatross.  perhaps something with a little less sea.  a pterodactyl.  perhaps it wasn't so much flying when it landed, maybe it just landed.  a meteorite.  perhaps a little smaller.  a commercial airliner.  again too much America and too much smoke and mirrors.  maybe i'll just call it what it is and not try to turn into something else.  a dignified and decent desk has landed in my room.  i think i love it though i don't even know it yet.  could it be possible? 

(my body hungers for winter, for the cuddle sap of snow and the glow of light when the world outside is white and frosted and still.  i have a need for the cycle.  the need for the cycle). 

a big, heavy desk has handed in my room and it stands upright as a soldier, it came from the navy.  perhaps life changing decisions where transcribed on it's face, and life saving or breaking deals were passed across it. could it be possible?   

stomach flu

in my feverish slumber i imagined myself a cow, a dairy cow.  i was one of many, each of us having a mailbox shaped body.  and each time my stomach turned in on itself and began punching out with electric shock boxing gloves, i imagined that we cows where being driven by prods to our milking stations.  and i would get up in my great agony and nearly crawl on my hands and knees toward the great porcelain milking machine.  and there i would release and writhe, the beige walls and a clock that ticks but whose second hand never moves were my only witnesses.  my eyes never opened.  i would lay myself down in the pasture of my twin bed and wait for the next milking.  but i knew and all the other cows knew that the farmers were getting no milk.  they were mistaking the water coming out of us for milk which was foolish and these farmers never seemed to learn.  i looked for logic, an explanation.  i gathered my cow friends next to me and pondered.  it began to thunder, the rumbling in my stomach transformed into menacing skies.  i watched as the rain began to collect in our open top mail box bodies.  that was it!  our bodies were filling with water because we had our open sides facing the sky.  it wasn't going to stop raining, but we could, i told my cow friends, we could turn ourselves over and lay with our open backs facing the ground that way when it rained no water would fill us and the farmers wouldn't think we needed milking and we wouldn't have to deal with all the pain!  very satisfied, i flipped over onto my back and continued to sleep.  only, i'm not a cow really and certainly i do not have a mailbox body.  i was back at the milking station within minutes mournfully mooing my existence.

and so my stomach flu has gone on and on.  each day i'm milked of the precious little liquids i am able to take in.  yet i'm afflicted with a sickening sense of hope.  hope it will get better.  in my last post i mentioned starving.  starving! an exaggeration, a haha harbinger of a soon to be awol abdomen. none of it was planned i assure you so let the pity rain, none of it was planned and i'm still sipping on chicken broth and nursing bottles of orange gatorade. it wasn't my fault. one doesn't write about starving metaphorically in one post only to have its shadow glance upon her for four wretched days on purpose. but, there is light this morning. banana and a bit of oatmeal cling fearfully in the bowels of my serpentine cistern, savage-sick stomach.  yes, there is hope still.

writing for writing's sake

one pines away for what she does not have
and then when they say
"look upon the feast in front of you"
she replies,
"how can i think about eating when my soul is starving"?

and so it goes on and on.  i'm noticing patterns, i'm picking up on repetition like the ridges on fingertips, lining up like waves waiting to happen.  and so the world is full of imperfect relationships.  how do you remember to love in the darkness?  and how dark is it really?  only so dark perhaps as the thickness of your closed eyes.  i'm breathing all the time and that's remarkable really.  i get to be part of all this. 

slapping at muscle, i watch the gravity of myself sway.  it's a beautiful thing, the body.  and i love you. 

today i said i wouldn't miss the imaginary snow of your imaginary eclipse.  remember?  sometimes i wonder if you do remember.  me.  but you were set on the show and somehow i faded away into the white out streets.

i love you. i love you. i love you.  it still sounds sacred to me. 

what i do

i had a dream where i went to a large bookstore in portland and i looked for all credible sources who wrote on the subject of love and the meaning of life.  i was looking for a purpose.  i got lost in the stacks.  i was so far gone that my hair grew long and my teeth began to rot.  when i emerged the year was 2020.

there will be a train that runs through my town.  my town will be the accident of some years of quick passion between commerce and a river.  then we many offspring will litter the streets looking for things to do, writing graffiti on the walls of railway underpasses, looking for our fathers. 

i am surrounded by mountains, three primarily--mauna kea, mauna loa and hualalai--and two that float in the distance like prettier sirens i'd like to know.  perhaps i'm bashing my head against a rock just to see which is stronger.  lava rock is porous and jagged just as it is smooth.  life grows here as life is resilient, much more resilient than my throbbing head.  i'm not trying to get ahead, i just don't want to be left behind.  it's as simple as that. 

i'm the keeper of little, green leafy things with highfalutin names and the killer of little, green leafy things with common names simplified on their boat ride over.  we need not know the genealogy of the russian thistle or the bull thistle or the fireweed or the fountain grass.  we need only know that we don't want them and thus we must kill them.  they are, after all, seedy characters.  no, i'm here to encourage the growth and expansion of the "native" species.  the solum incompetum, tetramalopium arenarium, silene lanceolata, kadua corciacea.  what regal names.  everything you might want to know about who they are is right on their little tag.  such a generous life for the chosen ones. 

i work in a unique environment.  high altitude.  jogging five minutes in the fine dust filled air will mostly likely give you tuberculous.  don't say you heard it from me.  and there are bombs out there.  old, cranky things, but still with the power to explode if provoked.  i stay away from brown, rusted things or unnaturally shiny things.  i stick to the fleshy, relatively benevolent little martians of mother nature.

unlike the bombs which can stay active for years on end, nature goes in cycles.  weeds gather up muster, spread themselves as best they can like too little peanut butter on too big a piece of bread and then they die.  it's my job to kill them before they mature.  if you want to be dramatic about it then i'm what you might consider a baby killer.  but please remember those finely named princes and princesses who i protect and pamper like my own newborns.  i am not without redemption. 

i hope i'm getting my point across and it is clear what i do.  thirty pounds of liquid herbicide adorns my back every day.  i traverse through the mountains like a spider makes track lines across distant branches.  in the end i have a poisoned field of dying russian thistle, bull thistle, fountain grass, fireweed.   in the end the spider has it's web.  its not really the same thing at all. 

the terrain is difficult, very difficult.  the lava rock is shifty and uncertain of itself, constantly rolling under your too tired ankles and it's sharp points finding the soft, fleshy muscle at the base of your toes and like a apathetic soldier to simulation, it aims its bayonet sharpness and thrusts into you.  dead trees and sticks make final pleas to cling to something living often piercing skin in the process and causing angry retaliation with spine snapping deconstructions and shoulder popping pitches of the offensive woody being further into the wasteland of what is widely known and accepted as the "impact area"

just to be clear, you haven't heard any of this from me.

my feet are a war zone.  but i keep my mind elevated.  i look out to the horizon and imagine trains in a town i don't yet know.  i imagine small coffee shops and long trails lined with deciduous trees.  i imagine bookstores and libraries so large that i could lose myself.  i dream these places.  but i log down this place.  it's strange how we human creatures operate.  all day you gaze over imaginary fences hoping to get "there" and then once you're there part of you can't help missing the former "here".  and so i log down the time i spend carefully sunk down in the hollow of the Big Island's collar bone.  i make careful note of what i see.  i want to remember it all.

there once was a girl who lived in a small house.  not a red house or a green one or even a robin's egg blue one, but a plain, matte colored white house.  it glowed in the dark.  that was her favorite part.  when all the other houses bedded down and sunk into their lawns, her house remained fretfully perched on it's grass like a nervous white dove only it wasn't that pretty.  so perhaps it was closer to a white pigeon.  and it did like to coo.

the girl went to a job she hated like most law abiding citizens.  she held out happiness saying she was "saving up".  she would allow herself a few indulgences like most law abiding citizens.  a movie here, a new car payment there.  anything to tell herself she was getting away.

there's nothing like getting away, she thought.  she searched for escape in other people.  if you don't know what this is like, then watch for the one who stares too long at your eye lashes.  they are wondering what worlds you've beat upon before this one.  they are imagining themselves a fleck of dust resting on your lashes like an arab on a camel.  they want you to take them for a ride.  anywhere, anywhere away from here.

i met her outside her little white house.  i was desperately nursing on the final drops of some delicious stumptown coffee, or perhaps it was folgers, but i like to pretend.  and that's precisely what we found in one another.  pretend.  make believe.  we were both masters of un-reality. 

stripping the morning pages for tenderloin

06/29
the moon looks like it belongs in some vampire movie.  a sliver in the southwest corner of god's celestial canvas, tumultuous and brooding clouds below--deep purple with red undergarments--and clear just above the horizon.  it's early morning and my ride has arrived.  i suppose i cannot paint the sky or the moon without some measure of tragedy.

07/03
i have every intention of climbing down into the valley today, but most importantly, i have every intention of climbing back out. 

each step is deliberate.

07/05
who wouldn't want to be the their own creator?  in the realm of language, i can be a queen, and more!  i am exactly natural, exactly exacting.  true flowing.

07/06
we who push along through our days.

the mountain is very imposing this morning and my heart hangs heavy in it's cage.

07/11
there are salutations slung over her shoulder like second thoughts.

how do you get the feel without the touch?

07/20
there is air trapped in my spine.  i try to exhale but perhaps its the change in elevation that is pressurizing me.  and i'm pressured to be as great as my name--the most glorious sunrise--but i don't feel so glorious sometimes. 

muzzle to your throat, my muzzle to your throat.  so soft, so soft i think it's butter cream frosting.  butter cream and my muzzle sniffing at your secrets. 

fog.  its as if i'm in a snow globe.  i half expect to see a huge, hungry eye waiting to see if i move then shake up the globe to see whose really playing dead.  and i am expected to emerge from the fog a moving and heartbreaking creature, something like a glorious sunrise. 

it's not the inhale i'm having trouble with, it's the exhale.  bubbles in the spine, some prehistoric condition of the bends. 

i remain a land locked line unable to return to the ocean but always, always flinting at its shore, squiggly, squiggly little wave want-to-be. 

the mountain is a stallion i palm and pet. and he breathes softly under me.  today we are one, mountain and me. 

ASR 11

moon rock stranger rusting. 
but new.  though rusted. 
only just born, considering, relative. 
you've come from nothing else.
all ego, all bravado, you are your own creature
lava rock. 
some circumstance, some passion
but perhaps without the emotional component
rather just...
hot.
born up too quickly
raised to a temperature too burning
you weren't able to form the true weight of yourself
weren't able to come to terms with your substance.
you are airy and light
and porous
you're full of negative space
but had you not been born of spontaneity and iridescence
had you been forged slowly
then maybe you could hold yourself
to earth
rather than crumble and break into violent, angry pieces of glass
then maybe you'd find a softness given to a rocked shape
then maybe you'd find humility
and let other things take you over.

ah, but can i argue a moon rock stranger out of it's nature?
ah but you are a wild hardness
you will be jagged for lifetimes
hiding long tubes of air underground until
one day
some unsuspecting creature crashes through your consciousness
makes you reveal your lightness of being.

until then you are instantly born and instantly aged. 
there is no childhood.
we break you down to cinders and throw you in with our potting soil.
how could such majesty be contained?

shaking my reality (08/01 journal)

i am in a divot, in a small little dent on an infinite sided die and sometimes i roll up and sometimes i roll down and sometimes i'm hanging sideways, pushed up against some wall with a million drunken eyes clapping and gin shaking in their teeth.  i like being in the image because at least it wasn't here, not here.  not.  here.  who is?  really and anyway.  i'm just half-way to nowhere. 

yet, each day is different... and ellipses are my best friends....

imagine living in a world of words.  so many sharp points.  could you impale yourself on words?  indeed.  all the time. 

roads extend from my fingers like spines all brittle and cracked like they have been left out in the sun for much too long and have become themselves desert sunsets. 

shadows and dark spots.  writing is like breathing.  could it be less?  the poet is poetic.  the aesthetic is aesthetic and i am a writer and that makes me free.