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.