Walking in a field is not extraordinary but
walking in this field with you,
the pheasant speak and the scratches on my ankle are inconsequential until later tonight, when there are hairline red streaks that itch like hell, and the raised bumps from feasting small insects, delighted and drunk,
and you, plunge your hand into the lake, tadpoles plump and plum color swim with gangly half-formed limbs into the murky algae; the reflection of you, pulling up a fish with rainbow scales, bare hands muddy and cut up and you squeal as the fish makes it out of your hands and into the dirt, gills heaving and make sure we get it home safely,

and the wildflowers can't help but brighten, downy and prickly fauna cling to the hem of my jeans, and this field is no longer a destitute thing, but oh so alive.

Banksy makes art of some sort,
we agree on this,
flowers in place of grenades, the room nods, and we admire the picture of a picture of someone's conversation with

an ally or enemy much stronger than canvas and

(roses, jasmine, lilacs)

you remember in a city somewhere, the powdery makeup of a woman, tapping her keys, her heels, her fingers on the slick glass-- picking petals off the tulip centerpiece at the restaurant, blonde hair, glasses, and

your nephew tumbling with chubby legs up to you with a fistful of crushed yellow dandelions, grinning and drooling and collapsing into your arms, and

the way he showed up, suit, tie, trembling hands and a single rose, and

we have conversations in many ways, I think.

Surprise, sparkle fire brigaid,
rushing to the next one, and still
there is time for someone to paint the engines red;

Feel the matches light up, and anchor your memories to only
the brilliant,
and remember me--

I looked out windows and saw white mares looking through the gauzy curtains,
lying in the fog, looking in and that is when I knew that this was all magic,

We feel it, don't you, think now. Softness on your lips from her lips, can you feel the moment before you touch when you are already there and your

bodies are only the curtains, but past this if you wake up early enough, and the morning is still just a little bit night,

and you see the spark and
you feel the warmth
and if you inhale if you
dare to hold your breath

you might catch the campfire from her veins, the scuttle of little night creatures hiding back in their flowerhouses and

you wonder, at the waking that you never could ache enough to believe. Surprise.

What it is like to hear opera, if you love opera and you don't even know it:

The words might be meaningless, and for someone who loves the interplay of words, this is an odd concept.

It might be playing on a playlist, depending on the sort you surround yourself with. And it catches your attention, with it's small building and bubbling, and

you (grumpily) tell everything else to step aside, this is our trump card. We've found it,

you quiet the dog, you hush your conversation, you turn the fan off.

If you are me, you have a cramped apartment but suddenly the room is so full.

You like this, no maybe,

you find, you

must hear this, and there is a thundering thumping brilliant swelling in your lungs and it starts in your belly and spreads slowly, building and moving through the tips of your fingers and

you are no longer thinking in words but in feelings,

and you remember as a kid your dad had tears in his eyes after a beautiful piece of orchestra,

and you can't help it, you are not crying really but oh! that is not noise, no this is not pop artistry or catchy limericks, this is talent and passion and beauty,

and maybe you have not really ever heard music, not really, until now. 

My knee smacked the ice and I felt the cold liquid seeping through my jeans,
and I cursed,
and a small man with a small bag looked befuddled, and he laughed at loud, patting the place his leg used to be, tipping his cap,

and I flushed knowing he knew I should have a little more eloquence.

I saw you there, chastising me, with those blue eyes.
I breathed in the entire small country in that big continent with that first tired sigh off the plane and then you couldn't watch me have the hope that would drive the rest of my life (just one of them) and
your dusty shoes matched their shoes
and your pale skin matched nothing.

And you shook, and I saw it, and I was home but you were very, very alone because
I knew this was made and you only knew that this was temporary and
what terrible thing to know;

I buzzed and moved with life and! I knew! that you did too. And I played cards in the dust and stirred clay with my hand, and I whispered for you to do this work too and you
spoke with lofty words about how the coins in my hand would break systems if I put them in other hands
and you spoke with the confidence of someone who read and understood words,
and I looked at you and then the boy and I walked away;
(I didn't buy the roses. I didn't buy the roses);

you thought I didn't see you slip him the crumpled bill from your khaki pants and you think I didn't see you confronted with the reality of facing individual suffering,

and you think that I didn't know that you felt the responsibility but you did and I did and sometimes I go to the grocery store to buy bread and butter and there are packets of roses and daffodils and daisies for $9.99 and I know that

of the regrets that will pass over me, when I lie down on a dusty continent and look up, some things will flash through me--
(I should have loved my brother. I should have bought that plane ticket. I shouldn't have hurt that woman. I shouldn't have played games with my words and the way I read you and

I could have paid three cents for that rose.

One day, sometime last year, we spent not a day but a whole slice of life (maybe the most relevant) naked in an ocean
and your hair was curly, and floated like jellyfish luminescent
not quite aware but definitely awake and
I was awake too and
the algae lit up the water and I looked forward and backward into the sea, my feet dragging but not touching the bottom of anything,

but,

my feet were dragging and dear,

it took far too long for me to brush my hand along your side.

Get up, and kick the wasp nest until you have red welts on your toes,
your ankles, your legs,
your stomach. Honey salve, don't you know.

When your father says, no son,
we watched your brother die but we didn't know how to stop it without, moving beyond our frames,

and we built this house on a graveyard but, don't we know how to keep digging, mother,
you are blind but,
you will fold your hands and read the devotional at the table(isn't that where it is supposed to be read).

How do you get up?
Get up!

(Please, I am asking- no begging--
No.
Asking.)

I've seen you laugh and here is the way the music moves me,

I'm

feeling like;

I need to ever. so. carefully. 

pay 

attention.

It's coming it is going and it is now, look out, oh love, look out. We are the graffiti on the sides of trains,

we 

are looking out and we are a blur of color we are the tattoos on the moving vehicle carrying precious cargo to places made by trampling down dirt

and we are curves, and green, and red.

I've seen those eyes make questions out of spray paint and,

I've seen the artistry in profanity,

and the profane in your art.

You hide your voice, like something you are ashamed of, move and move faster.

God if you

can sing,

then sing.

On the mundane becoming the extraordinary

It might have been easier to write when I was younger (old! Getting old!) because the sad things were tragic  and new and devastating; and just as one finds out oh! look! I am living—you also are finding out about the tragic horrible things and hunger, sadness, death and poverty, are all the tropes of the inexperienced. It is sad. People will respond yes?

Then, you get older, and somehow the sadness refuses to leave, and someone says to you, “Sometimes we just need hope. Write about that.”

There are true struggles instead of imagined ones. And they are not so black and white. The world is not constructed of the “good guy” and “the bad guy” and instead it is the homophobic parents whom you actually adore and cannot give up; the unrequited love of a girl with curly hair or a boy who is now living in Sierra Leone but is still dating his long-distance girlfriend in Boston. I think her name is Heather. And the boy has probably contracted Ebola at this point, and the girl wants to marry her girlfriend, and suddenly, you can no longer rely on the pretty and tragic tropes of your youth to make your writing mean something.

No. Now you must understand and figure out a way to live alongside villains, and maybe go to their birthday parties. Now you must figure out how to relate all of your sad poetry about bones and dust to living and breathing creatures who do not have the option to live or perish, but sometimes are just trying to be in between, because the reality is, it is this in between where we all have to reside.
Maybe you had to teach yourself how not to fall apart because it is now not the grandiose that makes or breaks you—it is not a tragic death or an overwhelming romance. It is the semantics, the nuances, the realities of what it is to be human in this world and that, sometimes it is embracing the droll and that sometimes it is making the tragedies known and acknowledged without adding stevia or honey or whatever it is these days that we are supposed to use to sweeten up the bitter.

Life is comprised of individual tragedies. They may not seem like tragedies originally to the naked eye. They may not seem overtly life-shattering. But you and I both know that the pang you have when you look at your daughter and you know that she will someday not be that pudgy 5 year old with the weird affection for vanilla yogurt devastates you. The things we push to the side—the aging, the nursing homes, the fear of not being able to contribute or lose your “gift” whatever it may be. So now—the tragedies are not as “other” as the burning house or the girl that dies when she is 16 of leukemia. They are not things to sob and cry about in the comfort of your bed before you shut the book and log on to your Facebook page or Post Secret or Reddit, or watch the 10’o’clock news.

Somehow, the work and writing that has to be written has at once become more mundane and more confronting. It is the art of controlling the kind of seeping emotion you want your reader to feel. Your writing and style and understanding of what true romance and tragedy and irony are have aged like a wine or a whisky in the cellar of your experience, and something much more frightening and subtle has  emerged.

Your grandmother is 84. She has blue eyes and white hair. Her fear is not death. Her fear is irrelevance and lack of function.  “Katie. I don’t like being here… everyone just seems so… old. And I am not…. at least I don’t think I am.” The quiet sobbing that comes at night or in the shower from her is not of a tragic and abrupt end, but a drawn out lack of participation or piece in the world around her. The “lonely shiver” that comes out of no where—and the little voice in your mind that reminds you of the utter largeness of the universe and the utter smallness of you.
This feeling—the one right now, the developing one that your mind tries to shut down—do you feel it? The subtleness of it, the resistance, the gloom that starts in your belly or chest and makes you feel slightly colder.

Or: the much harder and more difficult and complex combination of words that need to come together to incite some other feeling in your reader. Maybe it isn’t survival, any longer. Maybe it is not that the protagonist lives, because as we have just seen: living or dying sometimes is not the climactic end to our writing any more. Maybe it is hope, and what a lofty order.
You know that you have lived, and lived authentically. You have invested in friendships and maybe saved lives in ways you didn’t know were possible.

10 years ago, you were called to jury duty, and the 16-year-old punk kid who was so inebriated that he clipped a cops car—maybe you were the sole hold-out for his not being charged with “assault of an officer” in court.

The mundane becomes something hopeful. To you it was a three-day trial, a nuisance, and you haven’t looked back. However, because of you and the way you decided to stand-up, he was not given 28 years in a federal prison, and instead he became a counselor for troubled kids. He may not thank you or bow to you and you may not feel the intense joy of a romantic ending or the nicely wrapped conclusion of our cancer patient in remission. However, 5 years later, a kid named James comes to you and tells you the boy you stood up for in court became a man who opened up his home to the homeless. He thanks you, clasping your hand and tells you that this thing you did, this mundane and small and not-life-shattering thing has affected his life entirely.

So now the writing has changed because the experience has changed and you now recognize that the bones you wrote about are not dead dusty things, but smaller clusters of living capillaries and veins and have more nuance now.  It is these clusters that make up what it is to be a living body, muscles and sinew and names and a more complicated realness and, now knowing the back-story,
When a little boy says, “I love you, you are my best friend” to his grandmother in that short story—is that not more real than a romance?

When she says, “I love you too, James,” and reads him the bedtime story, and her eyes perk up, and she holds him closer, and her cheeks turn rosier and flush with purpose, is that not more, somehow?

The sad ones they
see.

How some things are harder to embrace.

Dear one, you are loved, it will get better and I know it is hard to see how. It is hard to see when the dust settles, and you are surrounded by the ways time stretches and suffocates you.

And it is so easy for you to laugh, and I am so jealous sometimes because of the crippling consuming emptiness and sadness and awareness that you do not have.

Why is it so hard for me to be light?

These clothes don’t matter. This body doesn’t matter. We will be gone and everything you are will be gone and what matters? What matters?

Maybe the tree shouldn’t have been eaten from. Maybe it would have been better not to know. Instead of the gasping,

I am always gasping. And it hurts so much.

It’s not that

I am sad or want to be gone or want to have pain.

But I have looked at a length of a belt, and snapped the black leather between my palms, and thought of the agony of waiting to cease to be and watching those you love cease to be and thought maybe I can’t handle this— all the waiting and watching and maybe in some ways it would be calmer to ebb away now on my own time.

my own choice instead of waiting to see when I couldn’t have this and them any more and being oh so sad it is ending instead of being able to be present instead of just watching it end.

I wish I wasn’t aware sometimes

it would be simpler not to be noticing

the way everyone is going about around me like a life is  a thing that doesn’t end like they are

on the track moving and running and I am hoping and hoping

I keep being frozen and waiting

but I gasp, I gasp noticing how we all keep going,

dear friend,

we keep going.

whispering heart you always

try and fool me like a colorblind pup who chases after the same parts of toys thrown in fields for him,

and can only bring back jagged broken bottles

oh why do you sear my gums with your green glass

why do you insist upon

cutting the flesh until I am only a ragged old thing

and I spin and turn upside down for you

exposing my underside and wanting only some affection somehow

maybe it’s time to stop staring and letting it go

You were it, the treasure that I’ve always searched for, golden beautiful love of mine.

Even if it is one year, maybe two— I can feel wanting your lips more than I’ve wanted any type of honey or mangoes or even water when the air is thick with how much I need. I am suffocated by the extent of my need for you. I can breathe in the ways in which I was clear- ah the clarity! I loved you, dear, I loved you oh. How I did.

hush now, mind and words floating around trying to explain away

the feelings and the way may chest constricts and expands breathing you in, even now.

so much time, and I wait

for your smile and spirit to release me from the way you clutch onto me.

sigh gasp, I know, you don’t want me the way I consume you (oh, how you consume me).

"I like to think of you in that little town," she said. "Happy and frozen in those photos of you and the sea."

if I were just a little bit wiser I would have

been troubled so much sooner by this.

It has been a hellish year and

shouldn’t someone who says they wish you were “we” want to at least

know the truth?

My body is a stranger

It unwillingly lumbars from place to place aching all the time under the strain of having to carry itself from the garden back to the concrete and swelter under the heat of airconditioned vents and the keys chattering away on a keyboard.

Sometimes we shut our eyes and there is the burning when the oxygen hits them and every breath is ours and we fought goddamnit for it and sometimes

the only thing I can say I’ve done is made it until I could crawl into my sliver of a bed and move the dog to the right side and, stretch out my muscles and tendons and all the other things the body is and

try and recognize my life as mine and not some distant life that I keep watching happen to some distant girl, like a movie that I have muted on in the background while I 

iron my clothes and yours too, and make food for the men in our house (because that is what the women do)

and clean the food scrapes and scraps off of the table and sweep them onto the floor until the boys then step on them, barefoot, crumbs sticking to their toes and

trying to sleep after a long, long day of apologizing

(because that is what the women do).

 am never raunchy I always

say the polite thing and make sure the polite feelings

flicker across my face

fuck

I am a deceiver

I plan it I plan

the way you will react to my subtleties

I plan the way you will see me flinch or see the vacant expressions cross my face I plan

the tiredness and the revolving door slamming in your face

and the way I shudder away from you or have distance and

I know if you are smart you will see what I’ve laid out for you

When really I am just blank and 

the politeness in every fucking day makes me want to 

rip off the heads of magazine people and

shove their smiles into bottles of empty cola and

take another shot of whiskey so you can feel like you can finally decode what isn’t there.

I’m sorry it isn’t and I’d

try a little harder if I could.

From my insides wretched and writhing, I have been told.

Wretched, writhing creatures and

when I imagine this I think of exploding faiths and dogmas, the way you took my heart and scrambled it, sizzling my mind and interweaving truth and crunchy apples wrought with worms eating the flesh inside and out;

and brie (soggy on the cracker) fatty and savory, melting on the sides of my tongue. Appetite (yes), but

Sopping wet with entrails and telling me that it was caviar (but from the insides again)

How do you disentangle your own morality from the dead and expired bodies lying on the ground, rotting and seeping back into the earth?

In the pictures painted on doors and houses and on the sides of the walls, the lambs were always wholesome and cradled and protected.

This was never the whole truth, was it? How could it have been when the things we take we’ve deemed more precious broken into parts and pieces than as a whole?

How could you not mention the pieces of chipped white paint underneath the nails of those clawing at the images on church doors?

These pieces are needed to construct an entire portrait, yet they are splintered in the fingertips of girls with long hair that hasn’t yet had time to be twisted into braids.

Every bit of me tries to stay in the present even though

I cannot help but race around the time in my head, the pounding maniacal self inside this skull that refuses to be content with the things a life are made of;

and I know of heroin that you are engulfed by pleasure waves streaming through your veins and that is why white women in their mid-thirties berated us to choose wisely and

what was I but someone who could choose.

Gratefulness is always expected of those allowed to be. My issues with God always came down to this, the measure of where my gratefulness should be and where it was and is.

I am only afraid because I never let myself slow down and it is tiring, and now I take sleeping pills to sleep and then I can never quite manage to be awake.

The way you move against me even when I’m not there and you are lost

no, not lost, just

a little unwilling to be found,

shudder, sigh and a lisping fan sputters the honesty we couldn’t

my hand feels for how soft you are, yearns for it, my ribcage melts under the pressure of everything you keep demanding from me

taking more, taking more

and sometimes the games end in sweaty limbs huddled next to each other, hoping the fire in the room won’t singe the eyelashes from our bodies.

When it is cold out or sometimes in the middle of a crowded room I feel

a wave of something, loneliness maybe or just a vulnerability to the universe (it goes on you know);

and I hear of your sadnesses, but I am so distracted because see! there,

is nothing,

more lovely,

than this baby in my arms, soft and crinkly and plump and plum.

Warm little fingers all slapping away anything and no wrinkles because everything is still just quiet inside and maybe

that is why we have no memories when we are so so young to give us time

to rest and re-cooperate and grow because if we had to remember even then any shouts or even the sob of a clock ticking away we wouldn't be able to relax our lips and tiny little eyelids because we knew the world was both waiting and fading.

So if the small whisper in the back of my mind,
the one I ignore and cover in notes of jazz and maybe the acoustics of guitars that I will never know how to play
the small trinket,
the little locket with a hidden picture buried at the bottom of the jewelry box--

if the unrelenting suspicion is true. If we maybe live this, and then there is nothing to greet us on the other side,

does my whole being collapse.

I want to lie down in the grass, and strike up a conversation with the most unlikely of people, because oh,
how brilliantly unlikely,
to have met you at this time, now.

I don't know what the fight was about, or why,
you cannot open your eye in the morning without taking your fingers and prying it open.

I don't know why you are fifteen, and seeking some kind of love in the arms of a boy-man who does not know what it could mean for your tiny body and mind to have a baby boy the same age as your little brother.

You and your glasses and plaid shirt, a watch from Walmart and a cigarette between your teeth, you are
fascinating to me.

So the photograph trapped and dusty and whining like a teapot, the steam burning my forearm.
I am you and you are me, and this is beautiful and painful and
all I know is that if there is something more and if there is nothing more;

You and we and us are amazing and valuable and precious and thank you so much for letting me have the privilege of meeting you. And I am so sorry for any pain and lack of love this world has given you.

I am sorry. Forgive me and us.

I am sad.

There is truth and it is on our side.

Darkness loses in the end.

Death loses in the end.

This is the thing I believe, the thing I keep tucked in my heart hidden in a small locked box.

Oh, I know this thing. I breathe.

Oh, I know this must be true. I breathe.

It is hard, it is hard, but I love mine so. Let them be forever.

Then there are the whispers, the ones who hate me.

"Please let this be true?" I question. I wonder. I hope. I think and then hate thinking, and force it to get consumed by the truth I know because

If it is not,

I cannot bare watching. I cannot be witness to the end of you or the end of me.

My sister, you are loved.
I will remember playing with imaginary bridges, and the bridge from me to you is real and always.

Whoever you are to me, you are more precious than the rest of this world.

The swings,
the way you let me read the things I felt to you-- confused. Confused, but trying to move your hand on my hand. Trying to make me feel better and questioning what it was that made me breathe so hard, and made tears come to my eyes when you could see in front of you without being blinded by the sorrow of everything before and after you.

I was so happy, you were happy. I had joy for you, because I knew that you didn't know the truth of what I knew. The very short time we have, the very cruel and the very beautiful.

You love the sun on your body (and I love it on mine).

You inhale with everything and you don't take it all in. I am jealous of your light heart.

The truth is on our side, love. We are invincible today. You will get it all, and I would give it all to you. I will fight for the truth to be real to me.

Light wins in the end.

Life wins in the end.

Leaves you filled to the brim
and I know
that there are so many challenges and barriers and ways you don't feel enveloped by
the delightful.

The slight touch of a warm hand on your shoulder, can reduce you to someone who remembers they were hurt or are hurt by
all of the veins of kids on street corners that have track marks
and that girl with the jutting chin who swears this is the life she wanted but

sleeps on a mattress in a whorehouse. All she wanted was to play music.

I see you. People want to know that there is hope.
We want to know that there is hope.

This cannot be it and that in the very depths
I know you want more.

Flex, and bend with your arm reaching backwards and stretch from the fingertips of your wingspan,
through and over to where your feet blend into the speckled earth;

Look at me,
You think I don't see you growing wings?

You think I don't know how it hurts to have feathers carve a notch in your shoulderblades and to have to decide
whether it is okay to enjoy hot tea and flavored water,
and you think
I can't see you struggling
to see if it okay to leap off of a cliff and if you can catch yourself and ride with the wind and let yourself
be someone that just might know
how to wield your own wings?

Swallow and your mouth is parched, strands of light coming and flowing from your body,
and all the people,
do the same thing. Do they not know that
this is an emergency?

How do we not notice that we're not moving any longer?
Champagne and strawberries in some rooms there are small bubbles fizzing over and the tart tangy taste of ferment, and hearts that are pretending that "Yes. After-all, this must be it."

I remember you,
and it is terrifying to recognize so many people. I take what I see from you, and I wait for you to call me out as an imposter.

But I am old. I have been here for some time, and I remember the allies and enemies that are the drifting and intoxicated with the idea that options and choice are not finite.

We played word games in a small house in France, and your eyes were far away as you told me about your daughter who died in Africa of dehyrdation. We knelt before the same God in different ways on the dusty ground, in the open, and we were trampled by chickens and vendors selling another bite to eat to another hungry face,

and I gave you the equivalent of a moment of my life and you gave me a mango.

You invited me into your home, and you slaughtered the only animal you had left. You held me naked and helped me into the shower to bathe when I could not move my ankle, my spirit, my legs.

You took me dancing in a country where I could not speak the language. You looked at me while your little girl looked at you, and your face remained impassive as you had bandages wrapped and rewrapped over your burns.

You told me you didn't like to listen to music while walking because you would miss the sounds of the street.

You asked me if you could dance for me in a smokey room. You told me to pray with you, and when you prayed I listened and so did the Lord.

You told me you drove fast but you did not know why. You told me that serving was selfish because of how we feel when we do it.

You held me crying because of how overwhelmed you were with pain, and I was too, and I knew then I would love you forever.

You had children who could have been overcome with disease, but you stayed faithful and you stayed home and you did not leave.

Of course I recognize you. How could I forget?

Iced coffee and windows with paintings on them of flowers that aren't really flowers
Give me enough to give you.

I always pray this.

I make things. I look at things that are lovely, and take photos of them.
I have a gift I abuse and neglect and only use it when my heart has too much in it.

I buy groceries from fancy stores, and pretend I deserve to eat fancy cheeses and bake fish with avocado or kale.

I go for walks, and eat too much chocolate, and have developed a taste for craft beer. I'm making up my life as I go along but I am supported and I am loved and I

didn't do anything in particular to earn this.

I should have plenty and I do have plenty.

But, can't stop with the thinking and my mind doesn't let me have my basic needs like you don't have yours. You don't eat.

I eat angel food cake and cream and strawberries all cut up and spreading juice.

I don't sleep.

Sometimes, I see glimpses of maybe.

This maybe is a good thing. Maybe, I can make a difference. Maybe, I can make this person feel loved or safe and not feel like they've fallen through the cracks.

I am very aware of the fact that me saying "I should also be starving" and giving a patient my meal is not the most hands-off approach. But, I am also very aware there are times I should have been starving, and that Bible verses go through my head and all I can feel is shame and humility.

People stick with me I suppose. I think this a thing, I will always have. Maybe.

How did you process this? She asked me.

And I told her I have volcanoes in my heart and most of the time they are manageable, but sometimes they are not.

Maybe I have a soft spot for men who are broken, or maybe just people that are broken. That respect is a thing that everyone deserves, and that me granting that respect does not mean I have done anything particularly great. It just means that I did the basic thing, and it breaks my heart. I have a hard time with patients that have been disrespected and it so hurts my heart for them.

Your teeth gently nibble at my thigh and the tender soft skin behind my ear and you
trace down my neck with your nectarine lips;

When I inhale you, you are cool and mysterious like the mornings the sun struggles to rise and you
committed to walking in the park with the vague fear that someone is watching you as your mismatched socks become wet with the dew of the grass. Exhale.

Your eyes weed through my words and expose me. But my secrets are no secret, and my future is only made of dried bones and the repeat button permanently pushed on track 8 of a CD you gave me before.

Yours is colorful and exciting, and you have things you want. You know how to want.

You have friends and people, houses and families, animals and creatures and mountain sunsets in your future. You have laughter and words and art. Paint and learning and stimulation and 70 more years. You have stamps to get in your passport, songs to sing in the shower (hot? cold?)

I am in the kitchen, listening to music I shouldn't be. I know that changing the song may literally save my life, but I do nothing.

It's not fair to let someone so alive love someone like me. Some people don't get to want things, and it's not just or right but, "Hey that's life!" croons the man with the leather coat and droopy shoulders, smelling like cigar smoke and whiskey, holding a sign (Anything Helps) on the street corner. Or was that the police man in the middle of the park, on the walk we took trying to figure out if holding hands still counts as too much love? Who knows?

Nothing is wrong.

It isn't. I'm fine. I eat food and I go to work and I come home and I get up and I eat food and I go to work and I come home and I get up and I eat food and I go to work and I come home and I get up and I eat food and I go.

I feel like whatever I'm making is a stall.

It is just not anything real.

I am floating and breathless, and anything but here. I am one step in, and one step out.

I am sitting in this apartment, and nothing feels real.

I want a day. One day. Where everything is vibrant and actually happening.

I would trade 60 years for this day. Ice cream, and the mountains, and
maybe a conversation with all of the people I love. Maybe 5 minutes. Maybe 15.

I would get up. Go for a bike ride. Read my favorite passages from my favorite books. Talk to my mom, talk to my dad. My grandma.

I would have blueberry pancakes. I would make my mom's recipe. I would play ball with the dog.

Why do I feel like I know a secret that no one else does? Why do I already feel like I am dust?

Why have I decided that whatever way the future goes, I cannot feel excited for it? Why do I feel like I'm going through the motions of what it means to be someone who is living?

I feel like I'm following a script, numbly smiling here or nodding there and why don't the things that made me happy only make me sad because here we are all I want to do is sleep.

On living with melancholy

They called it “potential” the way that your flesh and bones collapsed inwards when you saw the eyes of another person, and knew what dwelled there.

The way you couldn’t let go of the woman’s voice in the grocery store and how it caught when she said hello, like it was a lie,

the way you knew that all he wanted was to be the father that his father could not be,

that it meant the world to him to have his little boy call him “Daddy,” and mean it.

Oh. They applauded you. They encouraged you. They told you it was a gift, that you should embrace it, that your “perspective” was precious and it should be cherished

and you knew, even then,

that it would be a battle to stay alive knowing the things you knew, that you would struggle to make yourself survive the oppressive beauty in this world,

because it would haunt your chest like a thousand ghosts,
and it would haunt your lungs, and your breath and the way you couldn’t help but breathe in all of it at the same time—and that sometimes you would gasp for air and there would be nothing left to breathe.

And you would beg, and you would fall on your knees and they would be scraped and chafed, and you would ask to not feel the water with the tips of your fingers when you dragged them through the riverbeds and over the stones.

You would beg to not notice the ways people displayed their vulnerabilities because you knew,
that it would make your heart beat faster then it should,

and you would see stars at inopportune times, and
the music with words and melodies you could relate to would take you somewhere you shouldn’t go-

And you would be tired. You would be exhausted in recognition of how much there was to do, how much you would not be able to get done,

and you don’t know if it is clinical
if it is spiritual or just the way you are comprised, the puzzle pieces you were given in a velvet bag to
keep putting together

day in and day out,

and you know you can be powerful.

And you know you should be powerful.

That there is nothing stronger than the look and the promise you made to a face in a far away country,
and you know if you don’t honor it the purpose of your life may be compromised

and if you live with melancholy

you kiss your love and you feel her, you see her.
and the mountains make your body light,
but you are constantly overwhelmed with the depth of your privilege

the way you were only concerned about how your body moved and the way it took up space in a room when you wanted to press yourself against the wall and just be invisible, and the way your hair swayed, just so. The softness in the curls against your cheek.

the realization of the privilege in the type of insecurities you indulged in,

and then,

knowing that there are the children in rooms who beg for space, who only want to sit on dusty floors and spread themselves out and be present, and

their awareness of the kinds of depravity humanity has waiting for the ones cast away.

and
you know what it is to
be ashamed of your sadnesses because how could you deserve them when you have only had
soft cotton wrapping your body, and the food that you turned down because you didn’t like the shape it made your body into, and

you never,
considered who would eat—your sister (whom you love) or your son.

You never,
had to choose between walking through a desert with or without your youngest

and you never had to have your body be a weapon for men who were wielding feminity as a thing to break and beat over husbands and brothers as an act of war against an entire country-

sometimes you want to not get up out of your bed, and then you are ashamed because feel the softness beneath your head, how dare you,

when you have feathers cradling you.

and you want to not think of these things
because the beautiful things are there too, and you know
that in order to not collapse and writhe on the floor and to not
turn feverish, and let the infection of what the world is doing to those who are yours (do not be fooled, God damn it, they are you and yours)

you try
to control it so that when you smile at someone dear
and when you say hello,
it is not a lie.

You know you do not get to rest for a few years, perhaps.
Panic. how many years? how many hearts? how many days must I whisper
“Someday I will try harder--
and someday, I will do better. “

I didn't realize that my words were capable of making someone else feel
the same sad things in the way I felt them.

I need to watch this.

Sometimes, on a whim, I want to stop living. Not in a bad way. Not in a violent, or depressed, or sad way.

Just sometimes. I would be okay not waking up. Sometimes I think I could lock myself in the car with a sweater over the exhaust in a secluded park, and listen to music, and just sleep. But I don't.

I won't.

I know how selfish that action would be, and there are people I love and have responsibility to. As long as those people are here, I will be too. There are things that I am wildly excited about.

It is not constant. I don't cry myself to sleep. I don't wake up sad. I so enjoy being alive, most of the time.

But sometimes my heart is full and it is at capacity and I just want to not feel so much all of the time. Sometimes I feel numb in response to being so, so filled.

Sometimes I am tired and exhausted, and I expressed this for myself after a hard conversation with someone I love. And someone else (I love) found this and her heart looked broken, and I knew I had done that to her-- and I actually had a panic attack seeing how hurt she looked, how scared. Knowing I caused this.

It is a bad habit, being surprised when I affect people. It is scary to know that people care about me because I'm not really sure why they do. Pleasant surprise, but surprise none-the-less.

inhale, and particles of dust smash against the roof of your mouth and make their way coating your throat.

Breathe.
it sounds like such
an easy
command

if you commanded what your body was supposed to do
and

I am open to commanding you, and will
push your soul against the side of a wall
and hold you there while your body confines you to the pressure of stone and brick.
and you feel my hand tighten against your wrist and your
body will be pinned by what my body is

And I will hold open your mouth, and put my thumb on your lips. I will brush my finger over the smooth of your cheek, and pour you fine wines
and whiskeys
and rums

 And you will plead with me.
Please, please make me stop feeling.

(No). Firmly.
No, this isn't a request I will do for you.

And there you will be-- trapped between my eyes seeing you and you will not be able to turn away.

You will
not have anywhere to run because you asked to relinquish control,
and
now I have it,
and
it is mine to do with what I will.

Your body, and the curve of your breast up into your chest,
cannot believe you have made yourself vulnerable to the likes of me.

Inhale.
I press my hand, sweet, against those lips. Breathe me in. You wanted this. You will breathe until you gasp with the lightness in your chest that lifts you out of your body, and you
see us there,
 drunk on the wines and the fumes of what I am doing to you by making you,
be seen
by me.

I know that you were born in a room with hay instead of cotton blankets, and you envy with your tongue the way that I had silk and gold for the same reasons you had dust and debris

and even then, at 4 days, I should have known better than to let the pale softness of my skin sink into what you could have shared with me. I knew that

it could not possibly be an adequate design to have you waiting for so long
for me
to
remember that we had almost the same beginnings and
the truth is glaring.

There is the tingling breathless feeling of wanting and being
taken by surprise that this is even a thing you can do any longer.

The way your heart lightens and moves upwards and through the top of your chest and up pounding in your chest.

And you are nauseous but excited, and happy, and waiting waiting waiting until your bodies both can't stand it anymore.

Rock

If you can get to the top without
all of the breathing stopping,
and maybe one day you will be able to stop things like
gasping
for breath every time someone is separated from you.

If you can let the flesh of your knee sting when the rock cuts it as you wedge yourself into smaller and smaller places, and hope that whatever stones are above you don't come falling on your head
or on your arm
or on your pride.

There is always a way up, and you clamor up the fingertips attached to your fingers,
willing them to keep you stable and somehow hold all of the weight of a body.

And don't look down, because it is far,
and sometimes it is better to not know how far you will fall.

Sometimes it is better, to pretend that the distance is not capable of imposing splinters and cracks in the bones that will travel through like a bolt of lightening

across your body and through it.

The impact of your body on itself, the weight of it crushing you and you realizing that you have been turned against by it, as it impales itself on a log at the bottom of the pit.

Maybe sometimes we only look up and then
we cannot see the brush and pebbles,
the way there is nothing but emptiness to catch whatever fall you allow yourself.

(based upon the distance).

I can't get over the unsettling feeling that everything is an illusion.

bags hats gum comfort slippers this bed.

Your hand cascades up and down your throatline, and I feel your presence across the room and the statelines become irrelevant.

I feel you bubble like a liquid inside and outside of what I can consume.

Eyes burn when I close them, and the redish black shapes dance underneath my eyelids (street lights)

lamps

Air on this part of my skin teases me, and the thought of you makes me lighter until I gasp,
I need something to keep me on the floor.

I don't like being high above the city.

How many times have I told you, to give me music that has only a few notes and doesn't

erupt my thoughts with your thoughts,

you consume me, playing at carefree flutters of lightness but I've read your words through the language and tongues of others with the same bodies stuck in a life made for smiling.

I know you are on display for epochs and stripping down so the shadows cast light on your body, sway. "See? I have shadows." You need them to be observed.

The wood is smooth from the times you have spun around it to the music that they make you perform to.

I know the
ways you drown.

Yet, you beg me to lay with you in the sun, pretending the problem is the way the sun caresses your shoulder blades, lashing out and pinning your breastbone to the ground. "I am on the ground." We convince each other. Touch.

I can't stop watching you dance, and the other patrons have returned to flea-infested investments and the angry wails of tired wives with tired mouths. It is time to go, but you pull the chair up to the sun, and touch the same smooth surface, winding your body, casting shadows and begging me to suffer synesthesia. You perform, and the sounds that you have composed fill the room and I find myself drifting up over us, not able to hear your composition without my skin and flesh shaking in anticipation and confusion. You pin me to my own body but I cannot stay put, I am not able, you have filled every shiver with music, and my body never had a chance.

Twisting the knife

Twisting the knife, they say. We all nod, understanding. Obviously. We have had had knives twisted in our own guts, and so therefore ultimately can relate to this apparently quite common human experience.

You had almost gotten used to the way the blade brushes up uncomfortably against spleens and gall bladders and then the pancreas. The sputter of blood that erupts from your lungs and then your stomach, the rancid bitter taste of bile eating away at your gums feels like a neighbor that always seems to watch just a little too closely.

Eroding. The blade, sitting there, rusting and melding into the slender rib bones constructed of cement and rusting away, rusting away and thickening the protection that made up the things that supported and housed your organs.

You lived for such a long time, you thought to yourself. How does one live so long with such an injury? You have lived such awhile, and the shards have broken off of the blade and invaded your bloodstream. It hurts, and you cannot move without the sharpness biting into you, stabbing muscles and tendons, lodging themselves into veins and ultimately in the small fine tissues of your lungs. You've become accustomed to watching the way you breathe in and out and hoping this time blood doesn't drown you as you breathe; hoping this time the shards won't pierce an organ you thought was safe. Always you spit up the blood, and taste the metal, and your eyes turn red. Always, you wipe it away with the back of your hand and the underside of your favorite chair is now stained from wiping away the evidence of your body's breaking.

So long, you have formed a thick ropy scar tissue around and around the blade. Spongy and thick, it secures the blade in place, and only makes tears when you try to move. But if you do not move, and you stay completely still, the blade cannot do extra damage and is almost cordial in its attack. "I am still attacking you, you know" it mocks. But politely. With a handshake, and a head nod.

Twisting the blade is damaging the damaged, ripping the scars out in chunks, forcing raw beaten flesh to yet again reconstruct itself. New pain, bursting dying cells and gushing of liquified putrid skin and muscles, tendons splayed and shredded. Broken bone bits and snapped ribs, and a new wave of rusted metal shards rushing through the body. Agony is understated, and your heart faithfully beats wondering if it is assassinating itself, and you see little point in such savagery.

“I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ’cause you’ll play against you.” – Dr. Seuss

Things they don't tell you about breaking your heart:

It is breaking my heart.

There is not a day that goes by where some part of me is not deeply saddened knowing life will end.

I think this is part of why change is so hard for me-- it is not only, "Look this new scary exciting thing!"-- but also a true and final ending to a way relationships are constructed.

I don't know why seeing this as a circus,
makes me sad,

but I know that gathering everyone in one room is not something I can have.

Watching our time literally drip away,

while we've paused and tried to freeze the cadaver in case someday,

someone learns how to revive a heart.

Love in the time of
you and me;

for one of the only instances
I know my mind is slowing, and I am only thinking of your smell and the way your skin is always so soft.

I am only feeling your body and none of the weighings and racings of all the days
I am present and here and very much with you.

You make me stop leaping forward and forward again, and for this I am grateful.
My mind admonishes me for pausing but
with you in this room

It is satisfied that you are what time waits for and I can
breathe and I can
sleep and I can just be here.

If I were somebody else

Maybe we could have

traveled to the far-away places together

and

every time they said this was once in a lifetime, we would smile at each other

A corner sad smile

knowing they might be right but we would make them wrong because we chose it.

Knowing that we must be so lucky, because

in the parallel path

of a life with a different bend

maybe some other us wanted what we had,

but the things they promised would never get in the way, somehow did.

Maybe we would meander and explore and relish in waters that were clear

and went on for miles. And we could just be.

And it would not be so hard to keep all the pieces together because we already would know the broken and fractured and vulnerable places, and there would be nothing left to be afraid of.

Maybe we would be spontaneous, and we would have been young for longer than we deserved to be.

You would have sparked me with ideas and convictions and I would be in awe of how you were so aware of who you were and who you should be and could be.

How this world should and could be. And you would burn with passion and vision and I would be inspired.

I could see it. How this could go. If I chose radical action and if you chose me.

We could live this life fast and with purpose and we could

be revolutionary.

Maybe eventually, we could have even grown old. And it would not hurt so much to let go of the possibilities any more, because we took every opportunity. Every risk. Every one. And we would read and write and remember not one part or piece, but all of it, and we would have two memories of one life, and we would not be afraid of losing it to the age because it would be ours and nothing or no one could take it from us.

And I think we could have been happy then.

Faced with the most strangest of decisions (that in which I cannot control eg my heart)

I used to be the kind of person who fought within the boundaries of that which I thought I needed to fight in. This was the box, the framework and I then would learn everything there was about that framework. How to fit it all in that framework. I would bend and break bones to fit in the coffin. It never occurred to me that there was no box.

It is terrifying to discover that a rigid and concrete box that you built a life inside of may not even exist. Or at least in the way you thought it did. How do you begin to restructure an entire life and all of its pathologies? All of which you deemed ‘right’ or ‘wrong’?

When the bomb goes off, when the nuclear reactions designed in the depths of some lab, by some scientist who thought he was ‘discovering’ and ‘creating’ becomes a weapon to be used against some oh so evil, but faceless and nameless enemy (Let’s be honest. There is always a name.)

How does it feel to have nothing to ground you? Is it preferable to thinking there was a shelter and being ill prepared when you are shaken?

Black and white is so much easier. When everything can be categorized and placed in this one or that one, you never have to deal with being uncomfortable.. There is never the option of cognitive dissonance. You never have to worry about readjusting your moral schema, because the base of what is Right and what is Wrong never falters. It is very easy to know exactly who you and where your confidence lies if you never have to consider that there may be shades of grey (Let’s be honest. Isn’t it all grey?)

I am worried about certain things, that perhaps are too old for me. I am saddened that these people I hold so extremely dear may not be living a parallel life to me any longer. I am saddened, and I hurt. I always thought that this/you/would be there. For example.

And I haven’t taken time to ‘process’ largely because I am not sure what that means. Process what? What is there to feel after all?

I dreamed of this, of you, being here or back or at least looking at me again.

And now, here you are. Alive, and wanting me. Alive and real, and I remember and know your features.

I remember what or who you are/were to me.

Here it is. Honesty. I loved you, my dear I loved you beyond what has ever been in my heart for a boy or even a man. I loved the way you smiled, your laugh, I loved the confidence that you built up over yourself even when you could not feel this. I loved that you had aspirations, that you wanted to learn but more than that, you wanted to do. I loved that you loved me. That you recognized me as a fellow traveler, that your heart wanted to go in the same direction as my heart. I loved that you promised me that you would be constant. That you would love me forever. That you would be in the nursing home with me one day. That there would be prizes for the bingo because even older people deserved surprise and hope.  My dear you crushed me and devastated everything I am. I would collapse on the floor in absolute agony,  breaking and shattered and confused. I was deeply hurt and I loved you, and I loved you, and I loved you.

And I knew, then, one day while sobbing on the floor, wondering vaguely of the neighbors and what they must think (what kind of person is this? who do you think I am?) that this must end. One way or another this cannot go on like this. It must end because I cannot survive this. I will not survive this. Do you hear me? If I do not let this great and dreadful love go, I could not live. This love and I were not compatible, this aching draining abscess of a heart would kill me if I let it.

Ah and you.

You.

Seeing you now and hearing you now is like an echo of an echo and I know I should love you. I know that you should mean everything to me, that seeing your face and hearing your voice should cause my whole being to erupt and explode with something. Anything.

Ah but is it too late? You see I had to let it go. I had to let you go. I had to accept and commit to feel nothing because it would have killed me darling, it almost killed me, it ripped me and was ripping me at every moment I let your name cross my lips or your mind cross my mind.

Now. You are here. I remember this pain and I remember this love but I feel like I am looking at a stranger,

and I have reverberating pains like the aftershocks of an earthquake or the body’s memory of a heart-attack.

What do I do with this?

Say it.

That may sound repeated and old, like a sock. You know the one. The one you wad up and throw in the corner of your closet. The one that has a hole in it, right between your toes.

I have to say, I don't care any more. I really don't.

I'm telling you, you've heard me. I don't know what I want.

Why does this feel like a weakness, when it is just honest?

But I don't care that you know what you are to me.
Maybe this is a weakness too, if everything is just a game.

I could play, but I already laid out my cards.


I just know that the times I have imploded and been rendered loveless for months and years was when I remained silent. I made a promise once, to never let what I feel thicken and suffocate me from the inside out by being ashamed of it, or by thinking that feelings were 'wrong' in some way. That they made you broken and weak, in need of fixing.

Even if I intended silence (that caustic, corrupting thing) I already have failed at this.

Say it.

I don't know what it means. I don't know what I want.
But: You are beautiful. I love you. And I'm leaving.


If I were the kind of person I should be, I would let this go now.
But ah, if I am most alive when I say yes to the most dire of risks,

how could I ever look away from this?

We have to be content with the missed paths.

The times you have connected with this one or that one, and you know

that circumstance and selfishness steers you from intimacy.

You cannot mourn the ways in which you could have known the preciousness that is the complexity and story and life-arcs of these people

who amaze you with their existence, and the ways in which they have both chosen and been created selves.

The squelching of the
spiritual portion of what is a human;

is more than the necrosis of a small body part,
or the headaches that angels sacrificing your pleasure for
some heavenly vision can bring.

It is the starvation of a soul in its entirety (for what is a soul if not spiritual?)

I will take trying and failing to a half life, with safe half loves, any day.

Half of halves, portions and chunks of this or that heart.

A tearing off of you, a piece ripped from that one or this one.

So when I leave, there is a dull ache of one who has lost
a limb, a scab. When you leave, I miss one portion of my body.

No.

When I leave, I want you to feel the missing. When you leave, I want to feel with every every bit I have.

Take it all, so when you have left there is a deep gut-wrenching emptiness-- because I risked what having this means. You risked this (being oh so known by me).

Anything else but this is mocking what your heart has been made capable of.

I choose nothing if not this.

Here is the deal.

Even if I am angry, or defensive, or if you hit just a little too close to home---

I won't react.

-- I will not abuse the way I know people and use it as a shield, or wield it back against you.

I won't manipulate you.

I won't take something from you that you unintentionally gave me, unless you want me to have it.

I will keep secret from you the things I know about who you are, because you have the right to discover them and not be confronted with them from me.

You are quite welcome.

Miles to go until I sleep

I think it can be hard to maintain the intensity of conviction that a life-changing experience has on you. Or several. It starts to fade or seem far away.

We get bogged down by the details. I have student loans, and I don’t want to be homeless. I like exposed brick, I enjoy sushi, I like clean air. It is … nice… being around people who don’t have to think so hard to function, and it is refreshing just to be sometimes. People who don’t know what’s going on in my head. I can pretend for a second or so that this is what I want, and could maybe be satisfied. I want to make sure my parents are comfortable when they are older, I want to make sure I don’t die in a nursing home alone where they have been cited for elder abuse, and have taken away all the photographs away. It is nice sometimes to just be without considering everything so much, and focus on these ‘normalcies.’ This tempts me, but only slightly. When I get tired. And I do get tired. I get exhausted with the implications of evil in this world, the cruelty that this humanity is capable of. The cruelty that I am capable of.

It would be nice to be a participant, instead of being this observer. Which I have been accused of. Which I probably in all honesty am, and in all honesty know in my heart of hearts I am not able to undo. I feel like an imposter, watching all the people living their lives so easily. Sometimes I am jealous of that ease.

But I made a promise. Several.

I remember a particular turning point when a close relationship to me was shocked that I would ever consider going back to Uganda, and I realized that for him this was the equivalent of disaster tourism. For me it was the realization that this wasn’t ‘the developing world’ or ‘the third world’—it was simply the world.

How can you ever live knowing what you know and choose to do nothing? I ask this in earnest. What kind of cruelty would that be? Am I even capable of this?

I fiercely, fiercely fought to maintain my convictions, and it scares me to see them waning in other areas of my life. I am losing them, and it saddens me, and I mourn them.

But in this—it is a conviction of my life, and it has not changed, and will not really ever change. It can just seem far away when I am here, and consider what I have yet to do. There really is not enough time, and I am already saddened by the end of my life, because I know that no matter what I do, it will never have been adequate.

There is a scene in Schindler’s list where the only possession that Schindler kept was his wedding ring, and he breaks down weeping. “This could have saved … one more.”

Now I am no savior. But I damn well know I don’t want to have anything I love enough to hold on to as more valuable than the life of someone I could have affected had I not been selfish. Because I know myself, and I know that it is much much easier for me to make myself not fall in love (with a person, life-style, place) than it is to stop loving someone or thing. Whatever ‘this’ is—it could not possibly be more important or valuable than a human life—and I believe that with everything I am.