Frosted Lashes

I'm It's seven and I am waiting for the bus. It's a soft breeze morning and though one hundred miles away as the crow flies I imagine the sea, salt and marsh, air.

The term wraps up this week. Five consecutive terms, 97% As, one C+. I've tried to dig to the depths of my soul, limitless I exhale all those naked truths.

More than toes in the water which laps soft and thick to the hem of my knee.

My mind races and I count my heart beats. I am beyond the edge of sleep so full am I with ambition, secrets, and sensation. 

The Sun and The Moon

Fall equally into my bedroom trough the small window. I keep the window open these nights and much of the day as well. I am comforted by the smells and sounds the roll in and over me.

I hit the edge of my rail. The end of what I can push through. There was just nothing left in any of my pots. Even though it is afternoon, I am in my bed, my eyes thick and head heavy. But it's all okay, the feelings of the bones shifting against themselves, the back of my pelvis grinding into itself.

***

I wake up and my eyes crack open, they are full of sand, my limbs hang like sacks from my limbs. I swallow my morning cocktail: 10 mg of adderall, 200 mg of ibuprofen, a once daily multivitamin, wash it down with black tea. Showering my body registers the needles of water individually. I am far from keyed up, but I am present.

I call off the whole day and make my bed, climb between the flat layers. I listen to the rain and hear my brain begin to roll. Asleep, again, dreaming of blood and rape and discarded bodies. I have become sensitive to stimulation and now avoid most films about anything but science and space.

Closing the loop. I dislike touch. The smell of people is overwhelming. They're leaking.

**

I push some piles of dirt across the floor and hand my laundry lights to darks, patterns to solids. The collars open to the left now, I have changed.

*

Patterns of rain lull me into the nest of my shell. I am pulled into the form of my bed, warm, full of gratitude that I have a oil filled heater, blankets, a fresh box of tea, an empty home.

This paradise is well earned.

Minutes Pull Eyelids

The last days, or weeks, however you chose to divide and categorize time, have been dedicated to the strength of my teeth to hold me firmly to this earth rather than succumb to a relinquished will.

I am exhausted and thin in ways that I have never known. It is work and school and not enough art. It is being the one who takes on responsibilities like most people kick back beers. I say no to beer these days; I am, it turns out, allergic to booze. Thank you genetics and trauma for both an addictive nature and no means with which to fill that gap.

It's been good. The cold off the sauce life. I am learning about myself through recovery. I won't get all higher-power or any such nonsense like that, or at least I don't think I will, not now at least. I am too tired, over scheduled for meetings no matter how helpful they may be.

I cried on friday when I spoke with my mom. I had seen her all too briefly that afternoon, she called to say something, and I overwhelmed by all of it, felt hot tears behind my eyes swell spill over silently freely. The combination of her voice, my exhaustion, my reality of choosing to be constantly scheduled overly booked and three minutes behind hit me all at once as I said, I have a break tuesday afternoon from 1530-1730, if you're available, maybe then? and I had to reexplain that I didn't have time for dinner that I have a class at 1730, that I only have a two hour break, and that is seriously the first moment I will have between now (friday 17:00) and then. It's crushing. And in the back of my mind all I can think is that I don't actually have a day off until god knows nine days away from then, or a week from today and all my mom wants to do is cook me dinner and all I know is that I want that but that I am also a little afraid to see her because she is magic and puts me to sleep, she is magic and makes my eyes fill with soft tears. You see, I love her very much and she is like a cloud.

I don't drink or smoke or sniff anything stronger than cigs and coffee and adderral these days. I've spent most of my life doing all of those to feel anything but me. Me was not my favorite kind of feeling. Or, more accurately, the feeling I had when I was high was transparent, illusive, temporal, universal; I felt like a more me version of me.

Now I am me me and it's okay. All of it. I am starting to feel feelings and it scares me. I limit emotion; I often don't know how (or what, (this is confusing multiple tenses overlap.)) I am feeling. I couldn't (cannot) tell you because I don't know. I don't feel, that's what I've been saying, not like normal people. It's true too. It's a gift that I've been saving to open. I am only now edging the tape off the paper. Or all at once eleven or thirteen feelings manifest in an instant and it is so noisy that I cannot hear.

little bird

I wish I would be able to say, now things are behind me, I am whole and well and the stars are my comfort. The stars are my comfort, that, at least is true.

In this land of sobriety I am looking at myself and addiction. I am looking at the past and how it tends to claw its way into now. 

I got a call from california justice system yesterday. They found me. If they can find my current number, why didn't they call or contact me before?

It was two years ago, in october. I was driving home from work and ran a red light. The ex was waiting for me to go to the store so I could prepare dinner, so he could eat. I was listing in my head: milk; meat; veggies; I ran a red light. It happened. I was pulled over, ticketed, and left to go to the store. The thing was that I couldn't tell him and as he controlled every minute of my time, I couldn't go to court. I did try, the day was filed incorrectly, it was a saturday. I made a second mistake and didn't take care of it before leaving the state. 

The past came forward. The lady on the phone, you owe a grand. Today. How, is this information only now getting to me? it doesn't matter. I will deal with it as I deal with everything.

I was distraught. I ate my feelings in cookies, milk, cereal. I was on the bus pushing back the flood of memories and emotion that threatened to spill out and onto the dirty rail, cover the raucous teenagers laughing. I remember laughing, I think, biting my lip until I taste iron. 

I am full of holes. I have been burning again. Branding my arm in a circle of hope, I tell myself it is decoration, it is a symbol of recovery. I believe the words and listen to the cars spin tires up the highway.

*** it is six am, I wait for the bus, coffee in hand, wonder if I look like a trick waiting in the lamplight***

Dust Bunnies and Recycling

It's done. Me. I am finished. Have you ever grown so tired of your life that you lash out at the very foundations on which it's built? I seem to be lost in a reliquary, no defense, no preambles.

I am armor pierced by the molten rays of the sun
tremulous shafts of bespoken motes beaming
light held aloft captured in a slanted angle
neither shadow
nor light

Unhinged from my Gibraltar
I act without thinking
When I become Andromeda chained
I think without acting
Bound, awaiting either Pegasus or Neptune's beast or Perseus

I slip out of form fall
sliver through the cold steal
churn into the frothing roil of sea

am captured and my hair spun into a net of stars
and I set upon the horizon the houses of my shared fates
equals

September the First

A crumpled MUNI transfer dated October 20 2013, Sunday lay folded on my desk. I saw it there. Me knowing the date, remembering the day. Totemic, it remains in the keepsake pile. 

I had finished my landmark seminar and hopped a MUNI, heading back to The Castro for gas station coffee and a smoke.  It was Sunday night, then Monday the next day. Aaron was going o come soon, at some point, pick me up. I may have ridden the bus Saturday night. The ticket may be from Sunday morning. Time has a way of transporting memories to more convenient historical settings, memory amends itself. 

Living with a sociopath narrsiscist nearly stole my breath and stopped my heart. 

The months following and all the confused pain of loving an unlovable in an unlivable situation was important. I remember the final weeks or months. they would stretch into hours, minutes that is. Time can be so relative in the moment it becomes progressively more challenging to accept its passing. 

Saying things like: if I am bad he will lock me in the basement. No windows, one door. More a bunker than a basement, cinderbock. 

Fifteen years could pass me gasping for three solid legs, the triangle of stability needs at least three consistent points of contact to remain balanced, firm, grounded.

After six months of breathing the same air, I came to know I needed more than oxygen to survive.  The air was the same always, stagnant recycled arguments, broken cars, dishes, dreams.

I faded into a shadow of myself, became my name's sake: shade-shifter. I am the shadow shaded savannah; I am the ghost's twin; Rapunzel's  locks. 

I came out an ember, smouldering and malnourished from the tepid air; on fire, not blazing: a coal nestled deep in the safety of a pocket, that's the fire bearer's responsibility. 

Cake for Breakfast

I read a quote recently, which I cannot attribute: if there's cake on the table it can't be that bad. 

I haven't been sleeping, not enough. I am pushing into something, evolving a new form. My body shows the signs; it's bruise season. I don't mind. My bike and I are in love, my legs are strong and I look like a cheetah in shorts. 

Oasis of Foam and Blankets

I am in my bed and it is as soft as one hundred bottles of bubbles. It's an island of mohair, sheets, mostly clean laundry, a few belts, my one attempt at a quilted duvet, and a spider that jumps sideways and is the size of a quarter that was smashed on the tracks. It's all splendid, true luxury.

I've been spending a fair amount of my sleep time in a hammock, at the studio, drinking micro-batch coffee, reading, painting, dreaming. It's domain; and it's mine, I want to say hungrily, only that would be fibbing as it is not mine. Nothing really is, not even these bones are really mine. I come from and return to a concept I cannot comprehend. This in the contemporary manifests in building something with someone. Together, we are an odd mix of perfection that I does not cease to amaze me. So I've been a bit absent and timid (here, of all places. ).

In the meantime, I am sleeping in a hammock, showering as infrequently as the public allows, living off hints, hunches, and hope. That's the real kicker that last one there. It's the one that lets me be gracious and fall in love with the simplicity of all of it. I have never been happier than this morning when the outside sink got a stand built for it. It utilizes a garden hose and two five-gallon buckets. This means capturing a small amount of grey water after I wash my hands, teeth, mug. This means civilized. It's a different sort of thing than I ever done before. Fall in love with someone, having known them well first. I find myself terrified to speak, at times, as I am.

I strap on my skates, I step my leg over the bar of my bicycle, I feel my body in motion, become more specifically aware of gravity's influence. I like the feeling of supported free fall. Like a bike down a steep hill, you've got powerful legs and years of experience; it is nothing; wind and whir and confidence combine into a moment of transparent awareness before back in here down here.

May Hope Keep

Without even a small window I can still see the stars when I shut my eyes

Radical Means Root

I did it again: heated a horseshoe nail on the electric stove, cozier between the base and the coils, the meat between the bread, and grasping the tiny dagger with a pair of wire-handled pliers held the brand in my left hand heating the air that sits all over my flesh like a second skin. 

And I felt my flesh stir. I can't say if it was toward or away from it; that's so simplistic and binary. I have often found myself outside the hegemony, observing and synthesizing simultaioniously. 

That, at least is what I tell myself. 

Current History

The boxes of history are being packed
Books, sorted and boxed by genre: art, to the studio; healing, horses, herbs; journals and sketchbooks, of which there are two

I am a loss for memories

I have been so many things in this lifetime, the thread of similarities run deep
looking, longing, expressing the hidden knowing

I am a being without beginning

***

I want these days, nothing more than to put all of it right, in order, logically and methodically buttress myself against the chaos of life

The refrigerator's hum is constant