It settles around my face
A black, lacey veil, coquettish, at first.
It settles and starts to cling
The slight breeze of bantering light
Not enough to ruffle it anymore…
It settles and begins to constrict
Tightening so that it is no longer possible
To push my fingers between it’s black iron lace
And the lily livered skin of my neck.
The veil wants to become a shroud.
In utter terror, I look round to see what’s tightening
This sweet little noose round my neck
Imagine my surprise when it’s my hand
Holding that length of rope
Just long enough to hang myself

3 Pages:

I found this poem in Tattoos on the Heart this morning, thought it was beautiful:

With That Moon Language

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
"Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying
With that sweet moon
Language
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

- Hafez

I saw a peeper this morning...a teeny little green frog who was sitting on the doorframe as I washed the glass.

He was bright green with brown tipped tiny "fingers". I had just been thinking of you, and then there he was. I took a picture of him and I wanted to send it to you.

But I didn't.

I am stunned everyday by how crappy this world is. Even though I try my hardest to see the best side of things, the fact of the matter is that everything, ever-y-thing is just messed up. During my bleeding heart days I believed I could change the world if I prostrated myself at the alter of do-gooding. As cynicism and awareness became my constant companion I realized that making a martyr of myself for the good of others wouldn't be helpful and if I wanted to change anything I had to start with myself. And by being my best self, maybe I could positively influence others. Not so much with the broadstroke changing of the world, more one day at a time one person at a time, starting at me.

In being myself I have begun to be very protective of my energy. People will steal it - they may not even realize it, but if they do not know how to create their own, they feed off of other people's energy, like vampires. They take and they don't contribute; the relationship is not symbiotic ("two entities that need each other to survive and prosper"). I choose to surround myself by people who have cultivated their own energy and can share it, and take from me, so that we can learn and grow together.

In wanting a companion, a partnership for life, I hope to find this symbiotic energy relationship.

Do not simply believe what
you hear just because you
have heard it for a long time.

Do not follow tradition
blindly merely because it has
been practiced in that way for
many generations.

Do not be quick to listen to
rumors.

Do not comfirm anything just
because it agrees with your
scriptures.

Do not foolishly make
assumptions.

Do not abruptly draw
conclusions by what you see
and hear.

Do not be fooled by outward
appearances.

Do not hold on tightly to any
view or idea just because you
are comfortable with it.

Do not accept as fact
anything that you yourself
find to be logical.

Do not be convinced of
anything out of respect or
deference to your spiritual
teachers.

You should go beyond
opinion and belief. You can
rightly reject anything which
when accepted, practiced,
and perfected leads to more
aversion, more craving and
more delusion. They are not
beneficial and should be avoided.

Conversely, you can rightly
accept anything which when
accepted and practiced leads
to unconditional love,
contentment and wisdom.
These things allow you time
and space to develop a happy
and peaceful mind.

This should be your criteria
on what is and what is not the
truth; on what should be and
what should not be the
spiritual practice.

-From the Kalama Sutta, The Buddha

It seems that addiction, or any self-destructive behavior, starts when we walk out of hearing distance from our own voices. We listen to our parents, our church, or teachers, our TVs and radios, and we are rarely told to listen to ourselves, our souls. Once we are released on our own, we have no idea what to do with ourselves without being told by outside influences. We trip, we fall, we fall again, and again and again, and because of what we are taught early on, we see this as failure. We feel guilt, we hate how the guilt and the "bad" emotions feel, so we ignore them, we try to numb them, we bury them and in doing so bury who we truly are. As so many wise people have pointed out, you cannot have good without bad. It is impossible.

This is not to say that we should not listen or learn from others, rather, we should discover our own set of My People who speak to our souls. It seems that the soul needs constant renewal; from beauty, from struggle, from joy, from trial and error, from wisdom and freedom and wishes color and successes and victories.

If we ignore our soul, we become lemmings, and once we realize that we are being led to the cliff over the sea, it might be too late. Though I am coming to believe that even those lemmings could've said - "whoa. Wait a minute. We're gonna do what now? No thanks. I'll just step to the side and live."

I held my heart
in my hand
this morning
my brain was so busy
that when it gave rare pause
I thought that my heart
had stopped beating
my palm tensed
my thoughts whirred
and my heart began to race again
did it stop beating?
or did I forget to listen for it?

Smack of cool wind
Pushing on dense, hot air
clouds in the sky
like steel grey sponge paint
on a lightening white wall
Shivering trees
a storm holding its squalid breath.

Reckless and loose and renegade
uncaring, unfeeling
deceptively soothing rumble -
then a bright menacing flash
and roaring
demanding attentiveness
to its power

A mash up of
sight and sound and pressure
making ominous foreshadows
my God, in your infinite wisdom
How do you paint
such a clear picture of
how I feel inside?

I just found 4 more journals. 4 more.

I have been looking for it, that inspiration, that thing I need to succeed in this...I have been looking for it outside of me. Which is good. That should always be, in order for things to be balanced.

But I think that it is time to find it inside. I think I am ready.

Music. Music makes me cry. Like a hungry baby. A soul aching for a cleansing. Touch me please, so I can feel. Alive instead of numb, feeling instead of thinking. My brain is a force for my heart to reckon with and most of the time my brain overpowers and poor, poor heart. It cowers. But music restores it's strength and it's belief that the struggle to be ok with emotion is not all in vain.

Ben Harper's Welcome to the Cruel World album makes me particularly ridiculous. There was a time when I lay in my bed in the dark and looked out the window at the stars while that album looped over and over through my consciousness. Rare are the times that I will be still long enough to do that; I believe that those songs and that stillness were healing me. Since I was prone to breaking myself over and over for no aparent reason, it felt so good to surrender my bruises and scrapes to something outside of me that could tend to them. So that I didn't have to do it for once.

One song, The Three of Us...Ben doesn't even sing. No words, just two guitars. And it's like the guitars are speaking...more than just words. It's like he gets that sometimes words just aren't enough to communicate how you feel, there aren't enough words in all of the world sometimes to give justice to that beauty, that hope, that rage, that despair. So all of that gets infused into the guitars, the notes become the words.

When I am tired of all of the words, music is my solace. Something to curl up inside of and surrender.

(May 2001)

Remnants of sandcastles
dissolve in the sunset
sweetly forlorn;
minute statues
built in honor of
the blissful day.

Most of the series of poems above and below were written in my late teens early twenties. A few were written when I was 15 or 16. I knew that a book of my poetry existed, but I thought the contents were paltry at best...but there are 43 poems in this one book alone. I am a little shocked that I had forgotten this, how much I loved writing these words, and the fact that I have so grossly underestimated my ability to communicate what I am thinking and how I am feeling...

I can't believe that I lacked such faith in something so dear to me.

Wow.

(Written sometime in 2001, 2002)

Every light in the house
is on
trying to drown out
all of the things
that we didn't say -
darkness shifts around
in the corners
waiting to seep into my light
and permeate my brain
my heart beats
ever now and agian
it's only doleful desire
to beat for someone
with another heart
dancing in honest light
intoxicated with love
that is so powerful
it could never create anything
but what it is -
Truth.

Deficit In Philosophy

Exhaustion gained
after much sleep.
Distraction to the extreme,
Fidgeting
Fighting
Then taking steps forward
back towards what
away from that.
Explosion?
most likely,
although contingent on the
Facts
THAT CHANGE
scattered ecclectic collections
forever to deplete
my store of
Sanity.
I struggle
against chains
that tighten as I move.
Peace answering me
must consume my
Raging contempt
seal my hot mouth,
bind my contradictory wrists,
and shut down my brain
so I can Breath again,
normally.

I might imagine
that I look a certain way
a carefully crafted facade
not fully done at the seams
whether it be nails
or string
or fine silk thread
that I use to keep it together
it is faulty material
and it is not working

Things
grotesque unsavory and unflattering
Things
leak out, ooze forth,
staining and spotting and spreading
horrified I see it coming
I see the tiny leak, the pinprick hole
in the dam of ridiculously emotional water
I see it dripping and know it's only a matter of time
before the dam bursts

I could call out, I could shout, I could
stick my pinky finger in the hole
super glue, cement, a freakin' band-aid...
I could do something.
But I don't.
I watch as the infinitesimal speck becomes
larger and grows until
others start to notice
they look work worried
they look at me and wonder why I don't look worried

It's because I knew it was coming
I did nothing to stop it
and I don't know how to fix it
I just sit in my brain and watch what makes sense
become a ruin
and know that it didn't have to be this way.

"You are a girl who never looked in the mirror."

Pictures. Lots of pictures today. I could look at pictures, take pictures, monkey with pictures, all day everyday. I am obsessed with capturing that moment...sometimes I think that I should put the camera down and just BE in that moment; I've gotten better with that, the camera is not as attached to my face as it used to be. But I still get that itch. Maybe I can scratch it now by just doing something with those photos.

Speaking of being in that moment...that Moment's Gaze...I am trying to take each little teeny tiny little thing, every happy happenstance, in as I would a deep cleansing breath. I have the sentiment tattooed on my wrist, figure I should try a lot harder to live by it. It's hard, really hard, to not get caught up and bogged down in the day to day. But just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not doable.

I'm sayin'...

Written July 9th, 2008.

I am the kind of dork that likes to type. I like to hear the sound of the keys click-clacking, the fact that I've been able to type without looking at the keyboard since I was about 10 or so. I like to watch the words form quickly, letter by letter across the screen. What was once vast whiteness is now marked with something that I created. Even if it's just an e-mail.

I like writing with a pen better, though. Especially using pens with that richly pigmented ink. I like to watch it sink into the papper, tattooing the pulpy skin of a fresh sheet. I like to imagin writing on my own skin, letting the ink sink in and mingle with my blood. Ink and blood in my veins. Words to spare, sentences forming as quick as the sheen of sweat on a muggy day.

I got your stories. I got your words. I got it all right here...

...yeah. Right here.

Take the rain. Not in waiting for the sun, but as another, different beauty to enjoy about life.