All of the things we have been taught could make us confident, she is not.

She does not turn her shoulder to the side, shrinking into herself, apologizing with her body for taking up too much room when passing by people that have earned less and are less brilliant than she is, but more male. 

She does not have an easy laugh, she does not meet the eyes of everyone around her and make sure they feel at ease.

She does not run 10ks for charity causes.

How did she earn it? How did she get it? Where does it come from?

Some monsters, are comprised of teeth and hair, bones and bubble gum.
Watching cities collapse and noticing that from afar, nothing like this will happen again (There is beauty to that) Hush.
And some live under your bed. Some in your bed.
Some live safely behind a screen (not me).
Some have voices in their heads, and they whip around, trying to answer them-- (not me) Gasping for air, pleading-- I know my demons, I have new ones, help me.
(She isn't sick. She wants drugs.)
Careful. People with voices have monsters in their chests too, stealing their breaths their breaths their breath.

Masquerading cruelty as protection

You think you will win, because we are getting tired,
And sometimes when we walk, the bones in our ankles crack,
And you push on our back but

Truth

It is not my back. It is not my bones,
But we are still burning down, and
When your bones are on fire, my spirit melts into something I can't recognize.

What is that, swirling thing, doesn't anyone care who is on rafts anymore?

I am a little wary of seeing your face, and
I am a little scared of who you were to me.

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Lungs

She spent all of these seconds listening. "She was so quiet" they said, and " she had nothing much to say," but what they meant is that no one really asked. If they had,

They would have known, that it isn't every day you meet someone from the farrest of places. It isn't often, you meet someone who has so very much to say. 

She had been to the moon twice, and maybe she was lying because she had at least three moonstones, so she had probably been three times.

She held her breath to prove that since she had been to space she had figured out that on the 17th of each month she didn't need air. 

She would run, and she would run, and it was only a matter of time before she went to the moon and decided not to come back.

Aren't you happy here, though? They asked her and she would say "Neither here nor there" but the greatest mystery is,

What if,

That was far from the question that should have been asked,

And maybe a better question would be "Is there a where that you will be?"

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Bones

She lived in a home she built from the sky down and,
Her body wondered out loud, "plug me in please," and she shushed it. SHHH. Body.

We are not made of things that can be recharged, and other things were meant to light up with electricity, but you and I, we run out when we do.

And she would nail down boards of her house, chimney and rooftop, and it would be difficult some days, building her house this way. Her knees would get scuffed up.

"Some things take sacrifice," she said to her knees. Matter-of-factly. And she painted the roof. She hammered and splinters stuck in her skin, but, she knew that the house would keep her safe. Someday.

And her lungs quivered, and knew they could not speak to this woman, paint on her cheeks and in her hair, splinters in her flesh, and bruises on her knees.

She hammered and hammered and sawed and built but she still had nowhere to sleep. "It will get done" and the bravest, the bravest of her body, finally spoke and her bones said, "Oh love, this will not do."

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Bones

She lived in a home she built from the sky down and,
Her body wondered out loud, "plug me in please," and she shushed it. SHHH. Body.

We are not made of things that can be recharged, and other things were meant to light up with electricity, but you and I, we run out when we do.

And she would nail down boards of her house, chimney and rooftop, and it would be difficult some days, building her house this way. Her knees would get scuffed up.

"Some things take sacrifice," she said to her knees. Matter-of-factly. And she painted the roof. She hammered and splinters stuck in her skin, but, she knew that the house would keep her safe. Someday.

And her lungs quivered, and knew they could not speak to this woman, paint on her cheeks and in her hair, splinters in her flesh, and bruises on her knees.

She hammered and hammered and sawed and built but she still had nowhere to sleep. "It will get done" and the bravest, the bravest of her body, finally spoke and her bones said, "Oh love, this will not do."

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Brain

There is a secret way her brain worked, and you
All wondered why she walked around with her huge yellow headphones on, every day.

We both know, that sometimes the brain misfires and there is a mystical creature in the street,
Scales? Wings?

And she would look past you at the things music created not just in her mind, but on the road. She would flinch as the cars passed, because she developed a fondness of sorts for the way her mind perceived music, and
The things her mind made.

She could some days scoop it up in her pocket, or swallow it whole, or paint a thing that maybe others could see,
Maybe not.

The autopsy Amanda Grey--

Intestines

She was shit. Maybe that isn't a beautiful thing to say. But she would sit reading articles warning against sociopaths and how,

All they did was leave a path of destruction, and 

Like a psycho she thought, well hey at least it's a path, it could have been all brush and bramble, 

And maybe at least now you know what direction to avoid.

Are you the host or graft?

There is a storm, the sky is green the sky doesn't,

Want you to put up your umbrella. 

Some days you walk with me and some days

You trip on invisible cracks in the sidewalk.

Your chalk art is growing into a canyon,

What parts of your body want to revolt?

Maybe lately it is better to be just a little bit wary of 

Whether your body is telling the truth. 

Don't write about the riot,

But, maybe now,
We will write about the extreme protest that is the slipping of your hand into my hand.

I need water and light the way you need magic. The love affair I have with the sea.

there is the moon (I told you it was beautiful)
there is the reflection of it in the street,
there is the rain on your face, and once again I recognize that
I lived, and some days I am proud of that accomplishment.

I need magic, too.
I am impressed by the shoe choices spanning the crowd.
I reign in my mind, focus on counting them, the colors, the formats of footwear, the stones inlaid in them.

I can feel myself watching the patterns, the one-two step to her one-two-three,
The skipping, bouncing, shrinking of all these people. Her face pops into your mind, with her small child. No shoes, but a hell of a lot more intention.

I want to take mine (shoes, not people. distinction.) and hurl them into the water, watch them float a little before sinking, look across at the stranger in the red hat and grin because then at least they will know that I know I'm a little mad.

I don't. I'm mildly disappointed in myself that I don't. It is not a thing people do.

What I do, is remember the feeling. The leaving, the running, the descent into anonymity.

The first breath in a place you don't speak a language, the strangeness of your body not belonging with the other bodies, the possibility and uncertainty and newness of that. The thickness in your lungs.

I've made promises. Sometimes, I revel in what it may mean to just wear a raincoat when it is raining. To stop feeling every sensation as a reminder that the beauty is pervasive, and it is not yours to have but to borrow, and there is work to be done.

If we are all crazy women,
Actually crazy. Minds that tricks us, and minds that allow us to create marvelous sketches of the cracks in the walls of the places we have made home.
If we can with our tongues and mouths and breaths describe to the blindness in us the reasons why everything we have made is valuable,
If we can hear the voices and let them know that our voice is louder though,
And maybe we are altos and sopranos and maybe we whisper but it is ours and it is the one we hear.
If we can, crank up the music and feel the pulses in our limbs, beating and convincing, always persuading us to remember and to capture when it was we allowed ourselves to exhale,
And maybe not hold our breaths just now.
When we, crazy ones, are able to stop chasing and simply enjoy what we have caught,
If we can look at our reflections and hold eye-contact and maybe not be the one to break it first, defiantly warning our reflections that this time they would have to reach through mirrors that are not broken and place palms over our eyes because we are willing to see what we are, and
We will not be looking away first this time. And we will not be bowing our heads to her gaze and our faces are cracked and our eyes are old and we
Pulse, beat, and sketch those cracks because
They are there-- but the walls are strong and we have
Made this home.

The women I love, in all the ways--

They sometimes have a brief pause freeze on their faces.

Maybe they were talking about the future, maybe they were mentioning baby shoes, pink or white, or with those lights that flash when they pound against the dirt.

Maybe they were discussing a song, and how someday they would pick up the guitar, and play away the mosquitos while sitting on uneven blocks of wood.

A far away look, like scanning a memory or a hope of some thing and a wondering-- will this be mine? Do I deserve this joy? Am I able to design my life and maybe then they either look down or away or maybe they still gaze into the fire weighing what their minds will allow them to dream of.

This is the kind of week where I know and I know and I know that there is more than just a little work to be done but
I also feel in the bottom of my spirit that I need rest from the barrage of tragedies and
I need to revel in some lovely things.

I listened to him revived with thoughtfulness in his words, and insight into what he wanted with his life.
I sat alone and wrote and listened to music and I
Drove an hour in the dark to hug my love,
And I sipped coffee with honey and I said goodbye to a dear friend (but I have a dear friend).
I spent the morning with my sister and my brother,
I played fetch with the dog, and her loppy ears and tongue and gangly legs all tired and happy.
I turned off the television, and
I walked, and I walked, and I walked.

Maybe once I would have shamed myself for looking away but
I now know
This is looking in.

This is making sure I can raise my head up out of my bed, this is making sure that when I turn back on the news, I can brace myself with the strength of the things worth fighting for, and whisper "Okay. We keep going."

This is the kind of week where I know and I know and I know that there is more than just a little work to be done but
I also feel in the bottom of my spirit that I need rest from the barrage of tragedies and
I need to revel in some lovely things.

I listened to him revived with thoughtfulness in his words, and insight into what he wanted with his life.
I sat alone and wrote and listened to music and I
Drove an hour in the dark to hug my love,
And I sipped coffee with honey and I said goodbye to a dear friend (but I have a dear friend).
I spent the morning with my sister and my brother,
I played fetch with the dog, and her loppy ears and tongue and gangly legs all tired and happy.
I turned off the television, and
I walked, and I walked, and I walked.

Maybe once I would have shamed myself for looking away but
I now know
This is looking in.

This is making sure I can raise my head up out of my bed, this is making sure that when I turn back on the news, I can brace myself with the strength of the things worth fighting for, and whisper "Okay. We keep going."

On being a nomad part 2

I nip my teeth into the flesh of the peach,

Listening while you tell me about how you are going.

I usually leave, but, as usual

I hurry you along and 

The sweet and sticky juice of the fruit makes its way down my chin

And I nod

And you hug me, you tear up, I laugh you off and let go.

You hold on.

"It is time," and I remember I've said goodbye to you before.

And something in this life I've chosen or the people I've chosen to fill it with, I am always,

Always saying goodbye.

On being a nomad part 1

It starts with a tiny drop of a thought. We brushed our hand accidentally across the old plastic globe in the hotel lobby.

We smelt saffron, and tasted it in a recipe we made.

We heard a poem, a story, saw a photograph,

And then.

We tossed and turned, scheming and scheming. Our hair got tangled from moving our bodies from one side of the other.

We saw the time.

I need to remember how
I used to make myself numb when I needed to,
When I thought I couldn't have a future
Or didn't know how I could live a life that was mine.

Maybe this is worse now, knowing I will make the one I want,
Just not with the one I want it with.

I need to,
Shut it off,
Shut it down,
Let her go
She
Doesn't want me now. And so I need to forget
The love and vision and hope and possibility.

I need to become numb
And stoic
And not hurt any more.

I did this. I did this.
I know it. I did this and I don't get to try again even though now
I am someone worth trying for.

I do a kind thing now
when people speak of heavenly things and God and comfort and religion
and I get quiet,
and I smile softly and nod.
I don't reveal things like just maybe it is much simpler
and maybe God is there and maybe God is not.

I am not an angry atheist who has been disillusioned and is determined to take the whole rest of everyone with him. I do not spout scientific theories and facts, ripping apart by force the carefully constructed faith of villages and small churches, or adolescents in freshman year of philosophy class.

No, it is much more personal. I hope maybe that there is something more. I could believe so.
But the nagging back of my mind suspicion says that maybe there is not.

And really-- if you think about it (which-- is that not how we got here?) if I were to pick between a handful of us (because we are and were always the special ones) getting to live forever, while the rest of us were in pain forever--- would not the choice of nothingness suddenly set whatever soul I have, however temporary, at slightly more rest?

Peaceful and blank and maybe not there anymore.
And yes, I have had a good life in that these words as I type them make me tear just a bit. But wouldn't that maybe be nicer than having everything while everyone else has pain?

Didn't I already get that in life, with the abundant blessings I was given?

I let the people who believe, believe.

Risks

Love, as defined by Robert Heinlein:
"the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another becomes essential to our own."

This definition of love makes me vulnerable.

I have to be careful with people. Generally, in an effort at self-preservation, I find a way to love them without needing their love back. I am surprised, then, when I find reciprocal behavior. I am touched and made somewhat uncomfortable. I know that my friends, my family, certain people love me because it was purposed-- that is what the pact was upon entering the friendship. I am struck by the surprises. What happens if you exceed the limit of people whose lives you can be consistently and constantly entwined with? What if somehow along the way, their happiness and welfare becomes so important to us that it drastically affects our own? I do not like the idea of a temporary fusing of hearts and lives, mostly because I have not found a way to love temporarily.

I was disturbed by a comment from an old teacher of mine.

He hugged me, and thanked me for 'who I was,' and mentioned that I was the 'most complete' person he had ever met.

I was 12 or 13 years old when he was my teacher. I was scared, and lonely, and overwhelmed by how I processed the world. I was too skinny, I was insecure, and I was very, very sad.

Fast forward to now, and I am grateful. But if who I was was someone wonderful then, who am I now?

I have not written a thing
for a moment
and sometimes I am afraid that the magical recipes that brew in my head
will get bored of me always saying, "Not now" and " this is not convenient"
and "I love you but later" and "we will see" and "I should do this other thing because this is not realistic"
and they will scowl
and grimace
and sob
and quietly or turbulently exit my mind.

Much. Like. You.

Violets are crushed in a petri-dish, and liquid is added to them,
you take your pinkie finger and dip it in, smearing the brownish purple liquid on a piece of paper you crushed into a ball
making the art you can with what you have
and your fingers grasp around the edges of the plastic,
it is turning some color you didn’t know existed, and you taste it expecting it to be sweet
but it is bitter
crawl
your elbows scraping the ground, shielding you face from the other faces
they are always looking
and you grimace
where is this enemy? you wonder. where is the enemy we were supposed to have
haggard men-boys and girl-children and steely eyes and
you left
made your chemicals and put them in pouches and let them go from the tops of trees and on the bottoms of planes.
you told your wife, (soft hair, so soft) that you wanted to make her
a perfume and would
name it after the child she lost while you were gone crawling on the grounds and getting your elbows dirty and trying to keep you hands clean.

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

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).

13. 
    
    I 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.

Listen.

I have infinite respect for the capacity we have.

Float spit spin twist

fire and chemicals move the beats through you

sing move let down your hair, and 

turn your door knob.

Make an appointment and be on time.

Don't be late.

Make this matter.

Songwriting sessions

She said that only red wine and Spanish

guitars would make her live the way she wanted

and somedays the only ways you could get that one smile

was by reminding her of the day she laid still for hours

or more on that shore

I'd say dance with me, but baby sail with me

salty water on your lips your hands your face

sun gracing those shoulders, lull with me,

sail with me, watch it float away with me

Time for quiet and time to watch us, stop

know this will end and be joyful it began

Let me get that smile

and 

let me remind you of that day at 

sea,

bay, you and me,

dance with me, baby sail with me now

I'm not afraid to ask for a taste

of the sea.

On your lips (sail) your hands (away) your face (with)

me.

It is hard for a loud, bumbling, moving and talking and rushing creature to be bound and gagged and made to be
above all else
silent.

I'm concerned the sad thing is coming back the
hopelessness and duplicity and the this or that you or them them or me
me or nothing.

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.