In kindergarten released

and let free ever since,

I have looked to my recollections

mostly blurry photographs mother got

to find why

or to my clothes swathed in thick chalk, delicate calloused hands

that pulled tears from my golden eyes as torn and battered as they were

or to the source I take to the walls

that talk and tower over my small frame

and answer;

I’m indescribably small and insignificance

makes me larger than life

I live because I love

to climb to heights of smooth agreement

mental and physical worlds

all-encompassing sloshing

rushing through me far above the ground

The fusion of mind & body

that lulls my working brain

into rhythms of the rock, it’s endless routes

sequenced until they’re spiritual practices

and I’m unable to spell my name without them

As I’ve grown, it has grown

into me building roots around my core while

tarnishing my young hands with thick protruding callouses

               a piece of my history plastered on the palm.

Relevant being irrelevant is unbelievable to believe,

to embody a body

scaling up the arête

to be the conqueror of oneself

to find solace in that reality

life is in my very hands,

my plastered palms

death just below

Oh, how I have come back to myself

plastered palms, the compass pointing home.

Memories take precedence

over one another in my mind

This night, it was

the rain clouds heavy that stuck,

prancing and pattering on the pavement

they were letting go

Just as we all were, though

I doubt the weather forecasters could predict that

The front lawn trampoline

this night was at once

waiting in solitude as music rumbled

from the garage

a hoard of heads thrashing

amps blaring

hearts synthesizing

to drums bashing

bodies thumping

with hearts screaming like lungs

of the bodies moshing

whose eyes rolling

had faces so happy they were almost stretching to the moon while

Sometime between the hours of the night

that sound subsided

and out came the young

throwing dirtied Converse and jumping high all at once

only to be met on our landings of that trampoline by our

younger selves –

                or were those selves older now,

                                                      with childhood universes away?

Well the dark damp night caught our falls

and the water of the trampoline bounced back at us soaking our layers

Our hair stuck to our face

our rigid learned behaviors liquifying and rushing

down our psyches

as the act of jumping

and outstretched hands

grabbing on to one another

when even out of sync

pulled us down again

There was little else to be said

For jumping stopped time and let time be just time

like the sweet beating of a child’s clock

that ticks but never yells or expects or unravels before you

but syncs to the beat of

our hearts

that night

We were beating, too

It made me feel it

it made me

realize

that it made

me

Alive.

What’s more a dream

than reality ever was

is

This heat

enveloping the Ribs

in fire, smoldering slow with no flame

swinging heavy Arms around

the Bones, feeling friction so strong,

and the weight of

her Body

that fought the fight

by laying down arms

and being felt.

Her flushed face twitches

an uncomfortable grin

of compliance with this

Body’s curse, as she lays a Head

on the dark hour’s pillow

the pulsing, pounding heartbeat of the Brain

picking up on sounds

inaudible to the healthy Ear

                               –– the hum of the water heater,

                                    the bathroom light not yet turned off

                –– almost driving her dry Lips insane.

Later, rolling over

back into the terror,

her hot Body in the sick night,

she dreamt,

a fever dream.

I can only extend myself to another being for so long

––my arms are heavy from holding up our sky and

letting it blaze red into a squinted eye,

leaving that ever-lasting murky impression on my sight

while people around may have been pointing me off to

a new direction all along,

through to a road that diverges

and shoots off into the distance

paving a path bigger

now that space extends

between you                                  and I

this garden of life needs time to die

and relearn itself in a barren landscape

My Love,

              let me go so I can rehearse my grip

                                                and grab on stronger

and maybe have the lungs to breath in that holy sun

and that capacity to dream about it when it sets

            lower

                       and deeper

into the inner landscape’s curves

–– a mirror of you and I

of the tree of Winter.

                   The exposure of its

                    skeletal foundations                     

                    pasted on the pavement at this time of day

                    paints a mirror image,

                    a blackened and bony and

                    raw sight

                    over pale snow.

But the exposure of it,

             that –

                      of which was once a blooming entity

                       in the April hours the sun was its strongest

                      – is all but a lingering shadow to me now.

I come home and shed my layers

             overcoat,

                          sweater,

                         and it’s at the mirror

                                       bare hands gripped to      

                                       the cold sink, body

                                       leaned in

                                                     (wilting almost)

                                       that I eye my vulnerability.

The one we all carry,

bundled under the spring attire

of sprouting leaves and

fruits with colors that bleed.

If I dig to my core, would I be

so comforted

to find the bare bones of

Winter's reality?

Can I be enlivened by

             just the framework,

             the evolution of

             a thin, spindly tree

             whose outstretched

             arms are soon to be?

                         Should I fear the eventual death,

                         a shedding of a season,

                         if what follows

                         is rebirth,

                                     A new dawn?

To be met with confusion

only confiscates the meter

To see life through the eyes of the beholder

I weep at what lacks surely in my own.

Self-interpretations in need of elucidations,

The dawn’s rays

through worldly time

I’ve yet to have grown.

I’d like to believe I see what is to be seen

On the tips of time, the tongue, the tear duct

My mother always said weeping is good if like the rain

Those smoldering, watery feelings smashing pavements, smearing down windows in vain

Yet soothing to the light sleeper, they slide off the landscape in an eventual event of

Letting the light

in again, breathing the light in

Again.

And for that

I know there will

be light again and so

When it begins to be light again in my renewed eyes

Dewy and brimming with sense of life to live

I look upon myself and with warm hands I give

To the day that chose a new path, midway

It redefined the light and I too, will tonight.

03-02-2024

The only thing I know for sure

is that no thing’s certain-ly forever

like I once thought it ought to be.

The songbirds sang last morning

and will return atop the branch

overlooking the fenced space I steep in

before stepping farther out in those later less vulnerable hours.

The cars rushed through the night

like the rain dripping from the gutters

and soon, as I once thought it ought to be,

they will be cleaned and cleared

and clog once again.

My love, you will knock on the door

to see me like you said you would

and like you did days before,

until our love is rung out and left to dry

and evaporated in that holy sun.

I don’t know for sure

but the hair that you touch and the neck your mouth claims as your own and the beat of the chest that grows with every hot breath and the hands pinned down so lovingly like the eyes that close to see more clearly

are certainly forever

until they are not.

And what lasts longer than this love

will never and always

be me.

That’s the only thing I know for sure.

02-28-2024

A man and a woman went to get lost in the meadow skipping along the dirt paths together they went on. Lined with dying grasses ––
A looming winter.

Of frost and decay,
stagnant energy
building in size,
bursting through the tendrils of her beating heart – She looks up.

He’s five steps ahead,
a thoughtful distance.
Locked eyes send her face suddenly to the sky
in search of a remedy,
and shelter,
from the addictive, unexplored depths his stare can take her.
But evening’s approaching ––
the river’s rush
takes on the clouds’ form
and the sun’s light stretches before
ceasing to be more than a cast shadow on the snow-capped Sierras.

What to do? ––
When walking, a foreign feeling knocking on the doors of her soul suddenly takes siege of her form.
The magnetic pull she follows, until turning around becomes the only way the words she feels –
but fears ––
don’t come sliding o the tongue
and out past her mouth’s wall of teeth.

Vulnerability.

He turns around, hand holds hand. A silence replaces conversation when a look becomes
the look.

She grows in size

for he is but she.

Along the bank they reach a barn, weathered though still standing. The secrets it must keep ––
They turn around and head home.

Unspoken thoughts hover, tangled in the evening. The Earth spins
madly in love.

I said to myself,

repeated on and on ––

I went and I left

and I was scared.

I took to the road

and soon my car

felt like my body

the lines of the road,

             my life.

I glided through

the rolling hills of the central valley,

thinking of Joan Didion’s

written word of the evil Santa Ana winds

and Jack Kerouac’s prime years

spent zipping along these very highways

on his way to nothing

and everything.

The hours passed

I know –– because the

sun overhead soon beamed

bright on my cheek,

then dipped through

the mountains

until it was just me, the road and my fear.

I let it propel me, though,

farther from comfort,

even though I wanted nothing more

than to turn around

and retrace my steps

until what I felt was appeased

by familiars, until I was tethered to comfort.

I rode into the darkness ––

my darkness ––

until I reached

what I was taking myself to.

Grasping at the dreamland,

shivering upon this newland.

But what I found most

comforting

along the lines of that

all-too vast road was the thought

that the wild iris of my soul

was dripping with life

and beaming with height.

All along the journey

my fear drove me

mad to my core

–– but feelings were felt,

the spirit reawakened.

The perils of my fears;

The tailwind of my journey

Home.

01/14/2024

A vase with flowers sits by my bedside

Just earlier the bends and curves on the roadside

far from home reminded me of my mother etched into its sides

Her fingers running over the glazes, crackled and sprawled

remembering the shape’s dawn, its personalities outgrown

Overlong widths of time my youth

pervades this long ride

How much I am her

fired over warm time, fragile too,

Of that uncertainty

how I will bleed when the time is up

to take me out and put me by the bedside.

I'm here in a place I don't know for myself yet but I do know that godly sun and the water from the mermaid pools peeling over in clear contentment of the mossy patches guiding its path. And the salamanders ruling their underworld and the jutting rocks that make cover for the succulents and wildflowers and the occasional explorer in need of a chair. And so this foreign place isn't so anymore, and much more just a little opening in the rolling hills to ebb and flow with. And soon, if I lay here long enough, with the rushing river that hums its own tune and takes its sweet heavenly times, with ankles crossed, head cocked to the sky, and body in between melting into the Earth, this pulsating place may just hear the rise and fall in my sunned chest and that lively heart that runs it all, and just for a long while, will accept it as one of its own.

Tuesday there was a sweet yearning to hear my own thoughts.

To sit with my brain and skip along the lines of prose that I know its dying to create. After days of reading what to think, or observe or believe, and going to sleep before ever opening my ears to let in the sound of my own, I think I’m going mad.

Mad to ooze with personal feelings.

To get up from out of bed, walk to the kitchen, gaze out the window and be spiked with desire to pick an orange off the orange tree.

Walking to the garden, stepping only on the stones my feet end up on, lifting my crazy eyes up the base of the tree, feeling around. Grabbing, twisting, pulling until a bit of my own personal desire lets loose from the wrath of the tree’s warmth.

From the wrath of my mind’s insipid flavor.

Eating peanuts on the couch can suffice for now. Later I plan to take up space and make “art”, whatever that means. Or maybe force some more words out onto the page, enough to tell myself I did some thinking today.

At least of my own fruition.

I don’t know how else to ease this contradiction, my merciful yet unforgiving lust to detach from what I’m constantly fed, and intwine at last with the ever-lasting loop of thought spreading around me.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

To write something of high esteem, something "good" is like arriving with all the answers.

But the problem is I don't have the answers, for many reasons –– one being I may never –– but also because I haven't granted myself space to start.

And for that I will never, unless I let my pen start moving, judgement only a silly roadblock that I steer around and continue on through. 

I may never know what to write, or why I write what I do. I may never feel like I've produced brilliant work or even something worth humorous value. But I will not analyze and agonize over something so freely-flowing and organic as my process of writing. I shall never hold myself up, or back, for what's never been written –– or granted the light of day, the space on the lines –– may never be great.

Good or bad, a filled page is more high-spirited, more personal, more beautifully used up than a blank one will ever be. Fear is a girl's worst enemy. Let a passionate heart beat for a lively soul, not a critical eye. 

07-18-2021

Energy is flowing all through my body right now. The sky is hushed by thick clouds that hover over my head. I’m a lone soul on this beach, like me and the sound of the waves crashing can finally be alone. Each wave is calling out to me, rushing straight through me as if it was my destiny to become one with it. My line of vision has been spared a moment of peace. The moments that had the power to lead me to a different world lead me here instead. I’m basking in my own solitude but the waves will never stop crashing, void of their own solitude. To be still rings true, but my words spewing out of this crappy old pen are only causing catastrophe. WHAT AM I DOING HERE! My fingertips tingle and birds frame the horizon, as an anorexic strip of light still shines through. My cue to go. Or I will be stuck in a world void of solitude, just me and the waves. I will never want to drift away, it’s too powerful. My heart tells me you love me. Sand sits patiently in my shoe, for the moment it reunites with where it originated. I must do the same.