canopies, glass
hoods and arched doorways
soaked heels
sounds of shelter
nostalgic wet earth
crops and frivolous flowers
windswept leaves
renews and concludes
veils and revels

brain varieties:
fluffy brain, my favorite, when ideas come in and float around and have some tea and drift away before any new ones appear.
crowded brain, the feeling of possible head implosion when there is too much going on in there, a pressure headache ensues.
relief brain, when you are able to release something that has been holding your mind hostage for far too long, either by way of therapy, crying or intoxication.
intoxicated brain, who cares.
thinking brain, when you are trying too hard, like when you come to the end of a list and you can't come up with anything else to say...

i want to be liberated by light, all night alaska light. ride my bike down the rode at midnight. fish the rivers at two a.m. by dusk light. drive the roads all night in light. living in the space of day and dawn and never night. i want to eat the light for dinner and digest it for hours into the glow of white night. feel the light in my veins and the bright right to light.

"you can't run away from yourself." - bob marley

there is a human tendency to blend in. even the most outrageous exhibitionists prefer their own kind. perhaps it is evolutionary, stay with the herd to avoid predators. distinguishing yourself from the homogeneous mass will set you up for carnage. who is our modern predator? ourselves, perhaps. our distorted psyches, our unlovable, deprived, and abandoned inner children who lash out like a two-year-old, running when you shout stop, throwing when you insist they put it down gently. can we quiet them, make them use their "inside voice," if we hide behind clothes, make-up, posses, and walls? does the persona we choose to emulate make a difference? what if we all went naked into the world, shedding our outer skins like a snake, slithering about in the raw?

i guess we'd be cold.

my mind has failed me: memory loss, paranoia, anxiety, stress, confusion.

my heart is overworked: loving, palpitating, yearning, empathizing.

i must resort to my body... the last frontier of sanity. i never thought it would come to this having my mother tell me at a young age that i just wasn't "built to be athletic." these undulating curves all topsy turvy, informing of something more complicated. athleticism requires focus. i already know i lack that (thanks, mind). but, the body is all i have left. i force it to breath, force it to push, pull, strive, put one foot in front of the other with haste, twist, bend, kneel, bow, laugh.

the body is the only show of anything going on. everything else is hidden away within, miming small exasperated movements outward, toward the surface, like fish tipping to where the water finally levels flat to gasp their little ohs. my body can no longer be a mere reflection of surfacing fish. i must let it have a life of it's own. i set my body free. go forth and cascade, flow, wave, tremble, ripple, spring.

first, the incessant questioning, even after an answer is given. then, eating paint, followed by throwing milk across the laminate flooring. there was a refusal to take a nap, the demand to swing in circles until my head spun off and to read The Owl and the Pussycat, oh lovely pussy what a lovely pussy you are you are, until it became a chant lost to my cerebrum.

eventually, we took to the sun. plowed two straight sticks attached to my feet through the slush-like snow up the mountainside, the reflection nearly blinding. keep going. keep going. the air was edible like crisp fresh lettuce, moist and mouth melting. keep going. keep going. snow melt rained down on us from towering pines. keep going. keep going.

finally, silence. she's asleep, head bowed, neck crunched against her daddy's back. my time is brief, but briefly i will not combust.

Nothing more decadent than watching a storm pass: the sky split in half, smoky gray and eggshell blue, rain drops dissipating to a trickle, the last distant roar of thunder, birds dimming their wild flurry to silence, sun rays spilling over from clouds, surreal shadows on canyon walls. In a moment, one great wind sweeps the whole mess away and leaves a clean peace in its place.

frustrated, everyone around me always circling the same conversation concerning community struggles and segregation. feeling left out, outside, on the outskirts of some suspicious happening, wondering when it will all coagulate, nice and tidy like, joining hands and chanting kumbaya or at least not bitching about the people who do, even if they are naked and blocking the view. all my life, i felt this way and never talked about it so much. why are all these people always bringing it up? does this place really suck? am i just such a good listener? then, it occurred to me, maybe it's my spiel, the one i drag around from one house to the other like a casserole no one wants to eat. maybe it's my issue, thing, deal, hang-up. i'll just have to shut up and commandeer this show, see where it takes me.

romance is two people side by side against the world, driving a long road into night without fear or digging soil one handful at a time before diving into the river. being apart is not romantic. being apart is superfluous email transcriptions and desperate voice mail transmissions. it's pining love, which is not actual love, only a feeling of having committed to an infinite void that you long to fill. when used sparingly though, it could lead to further romance, like the kind where you leap over the space created by absence and immerse in a swell of passion. that's the only romantic part of distance, the return. but only done slightly and intermittently lest you prefer it to the mundane because truly, romance is glorified mundanity and that's why we miss it.

when i wake up in the summertime, i have already extended beyond the light blanket that covers me, down the hall and out the door; i am already in my garden pulling out weeds, poking at earthworms and sniffing the dew. i may even extend up a mountainside and along a river bank, my journey endless before i even get out of bed or have my morning tea. i never wake up in winter. i am still in bed, piled beneath blankets in the stagnant cold, dreaming about catching the train, losing my husband, falling overboard. in summer, all my dreams entail water and when i awaken, i drink water, my plants drink water, my gutters pour water, my acequia pools water into my mint and asparagus beds. winter weighs on me until my breath is a shallow rasp trying to escape my heavy body. summer sends me aloft in a breeze of seeds.

Big, belabored brain stuck in constructs requiring shapes and caged concepts. The child has five brushes, each with a different color paint, blue, red, yellow, green, brown and each time she maneuvers a swap of hairy utensil across the ladled down and bleached bark, she is transferring nothing but the sweep and stroke, nothing but the sudden fun of this or this or bang and splatter and next color and next color. I paint tree, rainbow, circle, heart, spiral. Brain does not stop it's working, intercepts the unbridled splash of color, thinks too much about line and form. Bang brain, splatter brain, splash brain. It will not cease its thinking. I think about the brain thinking and it hurts. Too many words.