Suspicious

2010-09-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-03-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-03-23T15:36:00.000-07:00

2010-03-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

"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.

2010-03-12T16:23:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-05T19:16:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-04T14:52:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-03-02T19:06:00.000-08:00

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.

2003-12-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

2003-04-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

Simon and Garfunkel "Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme/She once was a true love of mine."
Bob Dylan "If you're traveling to the North Country Fair... Remember me to the one who lives there/ She once was a true love of mine."

wise men and artists, their implications. that true love once was and continues to be transient. where it was once transcendent. true love is simply another way to identify and segregate. making one love more important than the other. always the other.

the other love is purer, simpler, without discussion. the other love has a carry on that fits under the seat. the other love is always safe and kind. the other love can't break you, jade you, and always makes the right choices. the other love has others and others that are mere and meaningless and the other love is the true love that once was and will always remain true to the memory of something else that probably never existed.

then there is the this love. this love is sticky and wet. this love is scary and gravity defyingly precarious. this love is hungry and needy. this love is smuggling in deception and thievery. this love is long discussions about the other love and even longer discussions about how this love could never be the other love.

only, in the end, there is really only this love. only this love is true.

2003-03-07T02:42:00.000-08:00

what if that green space over there was purely the foreground for the blue space over there and sitting amongst the various forms was a moving substance that carried the top half of itself upright and therefore ate with utensils and the utensil utilizing movements projected from the clamping jaw of a round delicate frame who formed molecules of liquid when chewing and spoke of the need for life to prosper while vibrational waves travelled into the spiralling side tunnels of one broad pillar of hair and flesh across the landscape who heard only the echo of wet smaking lips and the need for life to prosper such that all must work diligently toward procreation while the candel lit lips rather considered the prospects of making things grow in the green space over there when the sun stayed at its optimum angle in the blue space over there and the lips and the hair nodded enthusiastically at such undefined expectancies?

2003-02-01T03:05:00.000-08:00

it's too easy in this world to complain. it is too easy to not see how blessed we are at every moment for every limb that works and every breath that exhales. it is too easy to underestimate our ability to impact others gracefully. it is too easy to wish for more when we already have more than enough. i live 7 doors from the outside. i live 700 feet from the Yukon River. I live 70 feet from the ground floor. i am resposnible for 70 hormone rageing, cooped up, angst driven, teenagers. they are contagious. i am regressing. i live in a box. i sleep like slumber is heaven and hell is what happens when you wake up. i sleep in the morning and the afternoon but never at night (defined by the hours on the clock. at this latitude darkness is only what we try to keep outside). at night i send and receive messages that impact my dreams. my dreams are about seattle and aliens, love lost and secret disguises. tonight i will write letters to people i never met about their children who i take care of and pretend to know. i would take a bullet for their children i should tell them but instead i say, she seems to be doing well. i would take a bullet but i imagine i'd be crouching on the ground instead because i'm the kind of person that runs when someone yells, heads up.

2003-01-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

the smallest things can set off the hugest proportions. wanted to wash out the natty fusion of homemade dreading most recently taking its course on my locks. my mother asked me if i thought men would find my new do attractive. i told her i didn't care. she was disappointed that i would repress the sheen from my flaming red hair now more rusty red like menstural blood or old brick chimneys. maybe i don't want to be pretty. then again my friend iver says that dread locked girls are to him like bearded men are to me (damn sexy that is). and yet today i saw the magazines and they were glossy. i saw the replacement girlfriend and she was gorgeous. i saw my reflection and it was changing, creeping around the corner as if to rob me of my old self. the self that could fit into normal. but i could never fit into normal cause the world is so fucked up and i'm living it. i hear we're going to war. looking for reasons to bomb people. how about looking for reasons not to? that seems simpler. i am part of the we that is represented by the he that has his head up his ass and i want to live in peace. i am locked up in this fucking babylon and i can't pretend any longer.

2003-01-14T21:26:00.000-08:00

today i awoke to an unusual ice fog, unusual because the temperature was only zero degrees and ice fogs prefer colder. the atmosphere was thick and white like walking in refrigerated soy milk, but not creamy. no, the air was crispy, the inhale and exhale of frozen fumes. i drank green tea with triple echinacea in hopes of defeating the chest cold that followed me here from vermont. vermont is damp. it is dry here so the cold does not seep into skins. my friend wrote me, and i quote: "i love thinking of you nipple deep in poetry and snow." we're close friends. today, i could look into the sun that peaks only a few feet over the arctic horizon thanks to the subtle hazing of unusual ice fogs.