I should be so healthy, alive and awake

It’s summer now, so why am I not waking up? I stopped trying to keep my fingers on my pulse, I just act like a quack doctor gaping at random symptoms for which I can’t see any pattern or possible diagnosis. So I’ll nod my head vigorously, bobble-head that shit to my satisfaction and prescribe a most enticing snake-oil and the calming words:

“It’s perfectly normal for a woman your age.”

“Yup, this has been going around recently”

So this is how I sleep at night now l, with my back facing you, and my dreams bleeding into my pillow faster than I can sop them up, hands tangled in locks that tangle and nest around me like they have minds of their own and enjoy watching me extract myself from their grip.

I drink too little, indulge never. The drone of poets and writers cling onto my conscious in daylight, earbuds feeding me word and more word till I’m satiated and don’t remember what I thought I wanted to ever think.

It’s not summer’s fault and I hope it doesn’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t feel anything for it anymore. Not today at least.

The kind of realizations that leave you with a rubbling of concern

I seemed to have misplaced my femininity somewhere along the way.  I have not turned in my membership to the “fem-bits” club, I am still intact and aware of the sexuality I posses.  But even then somehow all my lacy t-backs have been replaced by boy shorts and boxer briefs. My clothes are more and more tasteless.  I don’t know anymore if this is an issue of femininity or simply losing interest in anything I was interested before. 

Look, if you’ll be my shrink, I’ll pay you in coffee and cookies at my counter. 

Sometimes the things that you cherish most are the only 6 things that are stopping you from falling away. Deliciously falling away into perfect separation from everything you’ve failed in. The weight that presses into your spine the increments of shame that are stacked like thin dry parchments bearing your signature on each sheet, towering over you forever. Mothers day celebrates the person who led you here and cut you off, pulsing life cord sheared off, bleeding and cauterized and fixed, so that you too would walk upright, tucking in your very own blind, mute embryo of a soul and proudly playing your own game of mommy to someone else. It’s not too hard, and if you’re very quiet I can tell you how to do it and stay intact. Like an egg shell that’s been carefully pricked at both ends and surgically had it’s insides removed. It might take years but you’ll be fine, and when you do that shell will be calcified and hardened nothing will break you ever ever again. You are a perfect, you are the most perfect empty shell. Happy day of the mother

A mixtape or “mix CD” that I dug up from 13 years ago somehow found it’s way into the new car

I squirmed through every one of those songs.  I don’t even think I liked any of them when they were on there.  They were soft sweet nothings that I put my babies to sleep by. 

But the feeling it brought back was visceral and weighty.  I felt for moments driving with the windows rolled down and the spring blowing through me that I was who I was.  There was a peace and serenity that came with knowing you had a complete family, that someone loved you, chose you, protected you. 

The extent of my nativity is almost a tragedy.  I am so far removed from who I was, but for a very small fraction of time I repented of my present self, If only I could be given a moment back with a simpler, trusting me.  The ignorance of my bliss is sometimes hard to ignore.

Don’t judge me you crazy long distance runners, you, but

since our car broke down I’ve been averaging 6 miles a day, running in the AM, then running alongside the monsters who are on bike to do the shopping.  And NO, I do not have a bike because I always just use the Jr. High girls’ but they’re back in school. 

On a positive note, I got a 1 hour get out of jail free card to cart a shart-load of stuff to the post office & listen to the audiobook of “A Confederacy of Dunces”.  I looked like a dreadlocked moron the whole way, snickering to myself and dragging a load of boxes behind me. 

In case you think I’m incredibly fit and good looking, let me assure you.  I’ve got a sizable ass (yes, I checked this AM, it’s true) and I’m not afraid to graze AGGRESSIVELY on whatever is in the house.  Which, unfortunately since we have no CAR is dwindling fast along with my enthusiasm to ferry shopping home like a goddam gofer. 

Hug me, tumbr-friends, hug me all! 

I’ve learned to recognise the signs. The hunger. Whatever the fuck it’s called. I know when I feel it’s grasp on me. They don’t call it a contraction for nothing. It wraps itself around you

and in a moment you’ve lost your grip on reality and wholly given to it. It coats the inside of you with a thick, driving, pulsing, need to exorcise a force so strong it’s taking over your humanity, your body…your very ability to reason. 

But you always feel it coming on, in the quiet moments before it strikes.  Because in the moments between you are lulled into a syrupy sweet calm that carries you away from yourself, and then you know it — like the peak of a roller coaster or the moment of impact, that inhale.  When it adjusts it’s grip.  Fingers twitching and gripping around you. 

And you tell yourself, 60 seconds.  You can do 60 seconds.  What are you?  Some kind of wimp?  But 10 seconds is 5 too many and 50 more is stretching out before you and suddenly seconds mean as much to you as the reality of the moment.  The only way to survive is breath it in, drive it in deep, twisting and gripping till you are one. 

To drown in a moment is too easy.  These moments of hunger grab at me with a slow, smirking confidence.  For these moments, these days, it will posses me.  Shake me out, like the feather-weight it knows me to be.  I know how long it will take to break the surface and I won’t hold my breath but fall limp into it’s waiting arms.

So I fell off the literary cliff: it’s like I just decided to hold my breath

and have never exhaled again.

It was bound to happen this way — the right brain and left brain of us both boldly uncovered in a way I never really forsaw.

It was not that he read my journal and reacted according to the banal, emo-laced dribble that I dropped.  The words were there, and however I want to explain them away…they were potent, clear and precise in their stinging tone. Though I do wish the date of said writing was noted more clearly and taken into consideration. Perhaps the angry scribbled tirades had time to cool in a fortnight & could have been digested a little easier.

It was the part where I sat on the bed next to him and read through the whole damn thing aloud, one entry at a time.  Every damn page. Not exactly to prove anything other than to demonstrate the futility of taking those words seriously.  The small snicker of having to clarify when he approved a passage that it was Plath, Keats or Rilke. Tearing through the awful writing that should be edited.  Trying not to cry at the things that I wrote not to record for posterity but to exercise the pain and never look back on again.  Cringing too much at how I never thought how bad it all sounds.  Proud of how well I write in the whiskey dark.  Wondering why I don’t remember some of it at all.

I don’t know what I expected him to say but maybe it doesn’t matter that it felt so much more silent than what I hoped for.  Now all I feel is that it is a waste of breath. 

I didn’t realize he mistook my writing for honest facts and well chosen words to express the reality of my perceptions.  Once I started hauling short stories about other people and events in my life I realize I was defending my license to grab everything, anything and anyone, and pump them full of dreadful metaphors, romanticized over-used cliches and shape them into my own private expulsion of beauty. 

Yes I wrote about him, and her, and it, and whatever the fuck that was back there.  And when he reads it he may cringe still. Perhaps at the intensity that he extrapolates from it, perhaps from the implications and suggestiveness of it all.

Maybe it’s because when I said it, on paper, it was mine.  It was not beholding to anyone.  The obligation to harness my heart, thoughts, insanity and common sense was removed and in this moment I was allowed to be nothing and everything. 

So Man, if he indeed reads this now, may not make heads or tails of me, but I will write it anyway.

a little part of me is calm and cool

but it’s probably because I seem to always be the raving lunatic that it seems strange to be on the receiving end of someone’s impulsive behavior.

A little chunk of me senses from the outside of the fuzz of gray that I really am the biggest fuck up of all time.  The things that I could have done differently could smother me in a suffocating stench of regret.  I’m watching the breakdown of a human relationship and all I can think about is “Now I finally get it”

Those grown ups that would carry the weight of their years right between their shoulder blades straight through and jutting out into their chest, the way they would smile with their mouth.  The way the light had gone out in them.  When I was too young to know these things, I judged them with a clean cold swipe & file it away. 

I think I get what it was now, not the weight of the failures of life and love, the slow fading of hopes and desires.  But instead the added realization that you have finally stumbled upon what put that look in the grown-ups eyes. 

Don’t tell me I’m being sad or defeatist.  I just stop and wonder at the pulse of this moment and it makes me not feel so alone knowing someone else has been here before me.

My hair is so heavy

it doesn’t blow with the breeze like yours.  The gales this morning were pushing plastic bags down the sidewalks & into the air like commuting ghosts late for work, making tiny dancing tornadoes out of twigs and leaves. It made squeamish salvagers out of every lady pressing down desperately on her skirt hem while trying to run in heels to the station.  Me, I cross the street, pulling on my elastic & let down my hair out of it’s heavy bundle at the nape of my neck thunking down my back with a low soft vibration.  The steps I take & the biting wind push against my locks, back & forth, swinging and swaying, moving them almost imperceptivly into the air for a moment & then back again.  Each step was punctuated by the rhythmic rise & fall of locks against my back.  No wild strands of hair whipping romantically, caressing my neck & whip-lashing “Pocahontas -like” like airborne seaweed framing my Disney face.

My reflection in the coffee shop window tells me my gait is not as weak as I feel, my shoulders are squared and I think today I might not be shaken so easily.  The sun is shining on me and today I welcome the the wind in my hair.

The curse of the m.f-ing “daddy story”

the activity that became canon in my childhood memories is the ritual of story telling by my dad. 

He could lay there with a two girls snuggled on either side of him waiting for him to pick out the perfect story from his tired brain.  The best ones were the repeats that we’d encourage massive & ridiculous details be added on demand.  We’d rouse his when he’d start falling asleep mid-thought and wrestle embellishments out of him because it was more fun that way & we all knew it.

I’ve recently started telling some of the cute and appropriate “grandpa stories” to my babies too because I can only think of a handful of incidents from my childhood that are worth building a story around, at least one that you can tell a 5 year old. 

I get it now, that what starts as simple stories to amuse kids evolves somehow into a spring cleaning of things you haven’t thought of in forever.  I can’t for the life of me think of things that would be half as interesting to tell.  The stories are funny alright, but funnier over a few whiskeys, massive prefaces and footnotes and probably end with a misguided trip to wikipidea to figure out what the hell kind of bullshit I spring from. 

I snake my way around the lean smooth surfaces of the double life

I lead when I’m heavy on my pillow.  The easiness of it is always something I miss at daylight. 

In daylight I hold you again at arms length, always away from me.  I pause in the matte hours I stumble over slowly.  Till time expands and accelerates into a dreamscape & I can call you my own, you are just a hint of something I know is a part of me.

the fall

Brace yourself for the fall in mind only.  Loosen your grip and relax your tense muscles.  Impact can never be met with as much grace as when you let yourself embrace it’s formidable inevitability. 

Hit it softly, bounce then and hit again.  Bruise, abrase and let gravity kick you in the nuts as many times as it’s sadistic self demands.  But you will not have broken into slivers and shards of brave-hearted folly.  There might not be a way out today but there will always be time to reshape your bent little heart

Bent

His poor bent heart, too green to snap right off when you bent it back and forth.  The bruises run deep through every fiber and if you look at it from every angle you wouldn’t think it could ever be bent back again.

How much easier it would be to glue back the pieces of a clean break.  How do you fix a bent heart?

Maybe the first “rhyming” poem I’ve written since I was a kid

It’s easy to drown
Though it might take awhile
take in a gulp and sleep with a smile
If you drown in a moment
You are braver than me
I drown day by day
Slipping slow till I’m free
Drowning with purpose
Drown without knowing
Sink down with my clothes off
With the ugly bits showing
Tap on my little brain
And ask if I’m home
Tell me I’m so selfish
To drift off on my own
Just leave the porch light on
For I might wash ashore
Or by chance another breath comes
And I’m drowning no more

Where we’re you when I needed you?

I walked the cold corridor, I paid my dues, shaking, and cold with eyes wide open and crossing my heart, I manned up and made the call. Where were you?

I was alone. I went to sleep alone and when I woke up I was still alone.

The convenient thing about being an invisible observer is you will never have to be responsible for your actions.

Sometimes I wish I never knew you

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