eleven down, one to go

One more full moon this year; a handful of days, a smattering of nights. I am preoccupied with my work and am uncertain how to navigate through my days, how to fill my nights. Grateful that there are not an endless number of them. Drawing closer to the people nearest to me takes patience and exactitude of mind and heart. The texture of my dreams can be grating and raw. I wake thirsty and exhausted.

True right now: I am soft around the edges, but since I am good at convincing myself that the world is about to end, I don't mind. I can live off the extra for weeks: I've done it before; when the end comes it is going to come down to roller skates and water.

I am sleepy and excited to see this year cycling to a close. Though a rich, deeply rewarding year I am exhausted to the center of my bones and need a week of sundays and two friday nights to fill my reserves.

I am not Irish

But I have a jar full of four-leafed clovers (there are a few fivers in there for good measure as well). I suppose this should mean I have better odds of winning the lottery, but, since I've only found some two hundred and thirty six of them in my life, I suppose I ought to leave the winning to someone who understands currency. http://www.deseretnews.com/top/542/12/Finding-a-four-leaf-clover-20-things-more-likely-to-happen-than-winning-the-Mega-Millions-lottery.html

A Woman Against Motherhood

It's a concept that I've held for the last decade or so. It is the idea that I, as a biologically capable adult female chose not to conceive a child for moral, social, and political reasons. I chose not to have a child nor do I either chose to sublimate my dna to the off chance that my womb may possibly someday carry jesus. It won't.

Anyhow, babies are not for me. Not until all of our citizens have education and nutrition. Have you ever lived off of cheetos and pepsi, that shit is toxic. And, why the fuck is it so hard to see that as we outsource our minds, as we belittle our bodies, as we fight wars against enemies unknown we soften internally and lose focus.

So I am out of that race, thank god.

http://womenagainstmotherhood.blogspot.com/

Master Disaster

Anyhow, even after all of these years there are loads of things you have yet to learn about me. That I adore cranberry sauce for example; that I am terrified that I have set an impossible, unachievable standard for myself based off of what, memorization? What is all of this besides a stomach ache and too much wine and a half-shadowed picture. I am murky at best but the brightest shadow is still nothing but a shade of infinity that rests neither here nor there. It holds the beholden and this if it is anything more or less than the search for delicious you tell me what is your amazing, what is your human in the ape suit sipping one more cosmos before you slip into the taxi have to see?

I am fine to mid-line these days. Things are in all actuality working out well in california. I've been here a year eighty days and I think I've learned a few things about living. That's usually about when shits and fans and not enough toilet paper come into play.

Mostly, I keep my mouth shut. And dream the impossible dream, because if a dream were not impossible in an imagination where shadows did not creep and thoughts did not stagger over recollections of almost remembered evenings a decade, no, two, ago.

All of this, these skills, I suppose I am ultimately the weakest because I have learned so little in my life. I can neither hunt, nor fish. I can read a compass; I have no axe.

Anyhow, I wish I had a means to express all that I could. That I work hard everyday to learn how to listen to myself and trust the impulse in me.

If it's late and you're sober, or just a little stoned, and the party is deep into cups

Quiet Beating Drums

Looking across the map of my skin
I see the scars, the ink, the age of my life
etched into the shell of the house

My elbow is swollen

alone today

because I am exhausted and might start to cry
if I have to explain to one more person why I can't sleep:
I dream in colors of a forgotten rainbow

Ten Acres of Hyperbole

The discovery that I can listen to Oregon Public Radio over the internet gives my heart pangs. I know those voices, I know that traffic pattern, I know that weather, city block, those shops along Vancouver. It makes me ache for a life I had almost forgotten and I grieve the woman I may have once become yet did not.

I gave up. I quit that life. I fucked all the best things into one big uncomfortable mess just to play with ponies and smoke cigarettes.

The pit is that even though I am lonely, uncertain, uncomfortable, cold, often hungry, I am alive in ways I never knew possible and for that alone I am grateful.

Recognition of what the absolute shit-of-a-friend, lover, partner I had been is freeing. Far from the solace or sorrow or attachment is the giving up and caving in to myself rather than fleeing the reality of my choices.

I need a coffee. I need a smoke. I need to settle my bones.

Pulling Strings and Folding Napkins

I worked for many hours to earn enough hard cash to get Starbright Firecracker BoomBoom serviced. I am lucky,  I don't need much to survive. I do need transportation. Not having wheels this week has been brutal for my social ego.

There was a time, not all that long ago, that I held a belief
that's all gone, long behind me
beliefs can be funny that way

pulled in and out of a linty pocket
on a little saturday
like the next best thing
or the new black

I say a lot of things talking
and waiting
for the other shoe
the one on my foot to fallI
and finally end the conversation
that never started

I've shaken my ass around a pole
tits poked out
for dirty dollars
and lipsticked collars

Supper time in the senior mess hall
can be anything
if you're invited it's best to cover your arms
and paint your nails fawn, or coral

I blend in button downs

I Pretend to be Pretty

On TV
and the internet
I pretend to be pretty

but
in real life there is dirt
hick and deep into the cracks of my hands,
embedded under my nails.

I work too much and am shit poor
I live off of cheese
I am out of milk
and
have taken to drinking safeway brand coffee

Sometimes, I want to quit this life
for a job
at starbucks

(because then
at least
I would know why I feel like shit)

49 and counting

There are not really all that many more days in this year. Not so very many worth counting (49).

I am officially an adult. I took Starbrite Firecracker BoomBoom to the shop for service and I did it before everything was jimmy-jacked all to hell. I am a little worried about being able to eat through november, but somehow everything settles into place and pockets stay full and hearts overflow.

And life rubs against my skin in the way that voices make my skin crawl and the feel of today and tomorrow and yesterday are all the same only today is tuesday and tuesday begins with T.

The ups and downs of being a working artist are numerous and countable. Supposing that god loses faith me me? then what will I do?

I tempt fate and my pay-as-I go approach always seems to even out. This love-hate relationship with life is grueling; this fun-shit motto keeps me in check.