Healing Prayer, in honor of the tide at last night's full moon

This is a prayer for wholeness, peace. This is for Carrot, that she travel well and trust her own deeds, for Kirsten that she and her family know peace. This is for Katie and sacrifices, her old ways offered to the vision and hope for what could be. This is for me, this is for me, this is for Poetry. This is for Susan and Emma and each generation stronger than the next, this is for Sis and Carol, mom and Maggie and the woman who've seen it all. This is for Kim and Patty who teach me, this is for every strong woman who ever challenged me, this is for Mom, this is for Dad. This is for Sean and Jamie content in their move, this is for Kate and Micah as they fly and learn to trust the tides. This is for Kelly and for all prayers for a home. This is for Mandy and Jessica and every sister I've ever known, this is for Laura and trusting her song. This is for Brooks and his patience and wisdom, this is for every man who ever fought with his heart, this is for Tom who loves and believes in being a friend. This is for Sam that he trust his way. This is for healing hands, this is for tea, this is for moonlight, this is for the ocean, this is for the drug addicts and those sick on booze, this is for violence and for poverty, this is for money and caves and islands and pain that still breathes. This is for Erika and believing you have a chance. This is for Reyna, Santiago, Umberto and Joel. This is for ancesters, this is for foul weather. This is for garnachas and black cherry sodas and dancing in the sun. This is for bonfires, this is for volcanoes, this is for stars, this is for family, and babies, and marriages and Meggie, and memories of who we love. This is for Amy who teaches every day. This is for the loving, breathing, healing earth. This is for alchemy, this is for ecstasy, this is for roots and bands. This is for madness. This is for sweet. This is for the tides. This is for Brandon and Brook, this is for music and gardens and tribes. This is for all of it, the heart and the loss, the love and the tears the laughing and music the fears and the coughs the hate and the anger the pain. This is for Chop. This is for teachers and presents, this is for students and awful hopelessness, this is for not having a voice. This is for Mike and Sarah, this is for Sarah and Tony, this is for Jackie and Chris, this is for Bernadette and her kids. This is for every boss I ever had, this is for Adult Ed Adult Ed Adult Ed. This is for Josh. This is for friends, this is for music, this is for beginnings, this is for ends. This is for the full moon and the planets and the stars and the apex and the zenith in every one of our hearts. This is for love. This is for him this is for him this is for Him.

Reprinted from We'Moon with gratitude, the chant & how I'll end this prayer:
by Mama Donna Henes 2006
We Are All in This Together
We all come from the earth and return to her belly. We are all made of the same substance, same as the sea, the soil, the stars. Birth, growth, death, development, change, adaptation, transformation, evolution, it is all really just about recycling.

We breathe the same air as our cave-dwelling ancestors--inhaling and exhaling, exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen with our plant relatives untold billions of times over the millenia. And the same holds true for water. We drink the tears of the crocodiles and elephants. It rains, it pools, it evaporates, it rains. We drink, we pee. Again and again and again, in a grand scale cosmic round robin.

All borders and boundaries and separations are pure illusion. Each time we touch someone, we leave some particle of our skin atoms behind and pick up a parcel of new ones. Thus we merge, literally becoming part of each other. I am you and you are me and we are we.

We are all in this together, inextricably bound by our beautiful blue planet spinning though space. We are one family, one community, one world, one living, breathing entity.

A'jo & blessed be. By 3 by 3 by 3.

BURNT UP

The first thing that happened is I chose to let my house start to go.

By that I mean my apartment, of course. But it's the first time since I moved in and got unpacked that I stopped picking up after myself at least every third day. And I watched in a madness that was rimmed mostly by delight as the order around here, bit by bit, started to whittle away.

I knew all along. This is a need to have some control: when it gets real bad, when it's real bad I'll know and then I will open the windows and go gangbusters in here and get to clean up and feel like I have some sort of power over this place.

I have poems accumulating again, lots of them and I have started to want to post them, but I wont. Bc there are some things I get about myself now, about my voice, about how I write. And to post them would mean to change the formats, and the formats are good because they are intimate to me. My artistry. I am 33 woah no I'm not but I almost am--I am soon 33 and have been writing poems in spiral backed books since I was 14. I am 33 soon and I know me now, know my voice really for the first time and I've never before now felt good about that. I have been writing as my first religion since the choice I made on the steel-posted squeaky twin bed I fell in love with Brandon with at Libby's old pad on Wash Ave: This is it. This, writing, this is what--no matter what else--I will do. "This" to quote my fave line from a poem back then, This, all I ever had to fall back on. So I am for the first time in my life secure enough now, secure in my style choices--affect on the rhythm and cadence of things--in voice choices for reasons I only just recently fully got are political to me, in content and theme that arent choices but that compel and create and are simply born of me much as I turn to and motivate them.

And so it is February again, that bone-haired last week of February that always singes me to deadened discretion on the inside. I am an assault pariah when it comes to that silly toss of the head term Winter Blues. Blues aint the half of it. But I keep going I keep going I keep going the words take me there and write me all the way through. And I refuse to substantiate the society claims, the impartial explanations: it's just chemical, merely the result of lac of light. Of course! But we dont get what we mean when we say that because most of us dont get IT'S ALL LIGHT. IT'S ALL, AT OUR ESSENCE, ABOUT LIGHT. This is soul stuff we're talking about. This is the twinkling nebulous of mythos that glistens on the inner wall of tramps and blue bloods alike. What are your darkest secrets, those rat-teeth gnaws that have you crawling the walls of you in there, especially when the Great Everything with preened deliverance is making us all East Coasters--where the deep blood of societal injury cellularly and in the very earth remains--sit still from snow again and again? Think not of dead-ends but reasons--those are the motivators: The Divine Hungers. The ashes that linger are deceptive, we forget they are reason and once were bone tissue and scars and are meant to feed the later-coming new life of things.

Take medicine or get drunk or stoned or mean fucked-up, or, the best, lie to your self lots and all you want. I'm booted at this now--a soldier who knows the cadence of the diligent rhythm ellipses of her own soul. So I know the truth of me this time for sure: I am burnt out. Going over the same exact chart of this same exact time last year--when my ailments manifested truly in dis-ease. I literally remember standing in the back office at a family support center this very time last year, way out in the country looking at all the bureaucratic broke ass stuff I was required to do, feeling so hopeless and powerless, Haitian refugees literally crowding the door in the shy way they do when they dont speak the language and also dont know you yet. And being on the phone with someone else from work and her laughing about all the excess: the numbers of numbers of students out in the sticks we are responsible for/to. And I felt that same thing break, and it happened, the same thing but not nearly as deep a break or elemental, again this very week. My job is one fit for a liar contented on kicking the ashes. So much of society stays content on this, on the look-down at your feet neck-stuck cramped stare. There are eyes I suppose that must stay most-way closed because to open them up, and I know this, takes a lot of willingness and mostly can be an awful, awful lot of pain and grief. Dealing with reality, at first, often is...

But my eyes are opened, and have been.

My voice, carrying crying laughing learning loving seiging destroying but all the while leading me through, and fighting for my own ability to trust in it all along, is the reason why.

i ride

Poem for the day, in honor of good things yet to come. Po'girl show tmrw nite, (Night Cat you still blow my mind) yeeeeaaaaaa!!!!! St.Vincent tonight w walshie, and a personal day and excursion to the home land all day today.

This is my favorite poem by Ms. Lucille Clifton, in honor of her life and her vision. She was the former poet laureate of maryland and died the day before valentine's this year. Amen amen amen.

hag riding

why
is what i ask myself
maybe it is the afrikan in me
still trying to get home
after all these years
but when i wake to the heat of morning
galloping down the highway of my life
something hopeful rises in me
rises and runs me out into the road
and i lob my fierce thigh high
over the rump of the day and honey
i ride i ride

Mad Vision

Remember when Dylan did that Unplugged thing on MTV? Same one Lauryn Hill did that caught her a ton of flack, sort of gave her her final docking papers? I was never crazy about Unplugged after that, after the way ppl couldn't get down with Lauryn un-pared. I loved her, the bones sans flesh feeling of the whole thing. But that spoiled me on MTV for good for the ill media hype they gave my grl.

But Dylan. He did this version of Knocking on Heaven's Door. He was aged, you could tell, it was before the whole tumor thing tho bc I remember seeing him preform after that and that happened later. But still, you can hear it. The age, which, much as age is wisdom it too is doubt, remorse, the looking back. You can hear it in his voice but it's all alright bc most of all you recognize that the hoarseness, the spine crunch of deliverance, the throaty almost about to break in there is the aged expression of Devout Hunger itself. His very voice, always such a part of his epic-ness, his whole persona and legend specifically because IT was inherent to his artistry, I saw so clearly how human that instrument really is. What fuels it then? What powers that Epicness?

I dont know what year it was released or made, but on the Peir in 95 peddling cassettes and CD singles as the prizes for a betting game that I worked the mic for, Dylan Unplugged was one of the many tapes that themed my days. Rolling up the tarp side of my game stand in the early morning breeze the sea glittering all tinseley, sick with no sleep and chemicals behind my shades but always lighted up on the inside in that slappy happy day-after-still-drunk-way that the sun and salt always did for me. The blue sky and the ferris wheel looming high above, spreading, big as hell, big as the world, big as heaven had to be. I dont know why I got to thinking of it this morning--maybe cuz Muller, whose dad owned that betting game we both worked for, just showed in my life all these years later. Or bc I saw Notorious for the second time over the weekend down the beach, or at least part of it before the cable went out, and Ready to Die dropped so huge that year and the CD single for One More Chance, with Meth and Big doing The What on the B side, made us all say we were getting FTW tatted on us by Chico that summer. Which makes me think even more of of Legend and Epicness and Hunger. Big and Puff. And what makes the difference. And what you regret.

It's not what you do but what you dont that you regret? That's what I've heard anyway I dont know tho. I would say it's all a matter of, all part of the being Epic. Torture is what you sign your bones too, what you hang your clothes too, what you name your song. What you love is always what you regret because if you're like me it's all you're ever truly willing to lay down for. And no matter what, laying down will always have a quality of recklessness to it. Frenzy-inducing. It's what we call Hunger. Why so many of us are scared to live.

The crazy, unadulterated full surrender.

I got changes coming, Mad Vision. What I used to bemoan bc I always used to fight my Epic tides, the ones that propel my indefinite forward motion. I'm stoked now tho. Fueled and fired, ready to go.

Destiny's not something that happens to you. It's something you step in to if you're brave enough to seethingly grasp at the Holy Amen.

Amen. Amen amen amen!!

Dreams

I'm dreaming again.

It happened last moon cycle, too. I woke up at 6:39 this morning to the traffic on Goldsborough, barely squinted through one eye at the clock and sighed and covered myself up deep under the covers and was out again almost immediately--but fell asleep with this light, laughing sense remembering the dream I'd just had. A bonfire with old friends from Catholic school in the rubble driveway in the woods at Ocean Pines. It was very pagan.

Then I had a second one, with my brother in it and Jamie, his girl. There were turtles, big ones, they were happy for the snow wanted us to see they were still there but scrambled over this funny scrappy wall Sean made and was proud of, of wood posts cross-hatched and leveled in this very crafty way. The turtles made sure we saw there big bodies flop over the wall. On the other side of the wood wall the turtles covered them selves in leaves. You could still see them, but at the base of the fense the snow had melted, the soil was super moist and the leaves generated enough heat to act as a thermal for them and they were happy to be covered there. The leaves and snow, the cycles, it all was a good thing.

There are bluberry muffins in the oven, I am squeaky body-tired and my consciousness is hairy, lots of little crevices in there where I've been slipping all day. Some days are just like that. Some days I miss things, I am tired, I get full of doubt. I have to work at noon today and then tonight and it will be all new students new students new students Hi dont be nervous You can do it Relax relax it's not a test it's so we can help and also Bienvenido hola, he-llo. Ugh I am so tired--and I was off for the snow a full week last week!! I will come home tonight, hopefully before 10, then Erika and I have a phone date to discuss our latest submissions to each other.

Erika, who just got the best news news that made me smile smile smile, Erika who on days like these makes me swoon to remember 7th grade Catholic school in the mildew basement where we could see people's feet on the concrete parking lot out the vented windows near the ceilings top of some of those rooms. Sr. Francis's class and we were all afraid, Ms. Fouse's class and under the desks Erika's long scrawl, on fringed loose leaf, characters even then seeped deep in the history of another time. My precious friend who holds roots in there, the way plants and trees are connected deep under ground in ways we will never, by the light of day, ever see.

O mama if I could I would write and laugh and cook all day breathe the smells of your frozen earth my face in the tall window here in your sun. I would smile, happy to remember all my dreams. I would talk to the maple tree let the crevices inside grow wide and whole until they weren't cracks anymore but simply whole new landscapes of me.

what i am listening to: The High Strung

Sleepless long nights; Song # 3

This morning I was dancing in my living room to Leslie Feist's 1,2,3,4. This got me to thinking, or remembering which I seem to think is how our little brains spend a lot of their aimless time, about when I first heard that song. I was going through a music dry spell which embarassingly had been ongoing for several years. Something deep in me, primal but that I could feel and that reminds me of coyote yowls and moonlight and feeling the wind shift your hair on an otherwise windless night was yearning, and it gave feet to this urge: Go to Texas & see your grl. Go be with her while her baby's born she needs you now.

Mandy was/is my best friend from practically the first day she knocked on the door of that lightless must-filled icicleshangingonthewindowunit room-enough for our twin beds and a sink in the corner awful little single I shared with Kareem at the Drifthood summer of 96. One I got kicked out of eventually for not paying rent after Kareem exploded forties all over the place cuz he thought I ratted him out for stealing some drugs and money downtown. Cmon. Anyhow Man was the remedy to my hurting heart that summer, we sat a hundred days in the heat and light of that high orange sun, our buts in the mud at the ocean's edge our hands covered by sea froth and silently picking at shells and tiny stones. Later, we travelled toghether and ever since have been connected by that karma-sense same as coyote howls and the way the moonlight sometimes feels like sun.

So in 2008 when Derek (i think i spelled that wrong) her son came something in me rustled up and I flew to Texas for ten days or something to be with her in that little timeless nest of love. I'd just quit my job and didn't know what was next and was in a deep way on the run. 1234 was out it was a theme for some IPOD commercial and That was the same trip that we went to a flea market on the side of the highway in these ratted falling down shacks and she bought Cody a samarai sword and I bought these crazy long earrings from this witchy woman stand with all these strong strong gems, and it was also the day I first curled my hair again put on make-up and remembered how much I loved eccentric clothes.

Fesit, that song by her, and later others, too, became the theme songs of my life and also of tortured love. She introduced me, as well as Man and her son and oldskool travelkarma and earrings from a Mexi-run fleamrkt, to music again, to myself, and love.

Here is the song,& yes, it's full of coreographed dancing, hoooorah!

Morning Dance Song # 2

Man, was I punchy silly groggy this morning making my coffee and This song was half-way through when I realized how much fun I was having dancing. It occured to me most times I dont even reaize I'm dancing it just happens, and now that I've written about it twice will it change the experience hopefully not. I'm a lonely frog he he. Good morning world, happy love! I'm spending the day w my momma I hope you get special time with those that you love today too, xoxo.

Prayer for Cousin Kate

My cousin Katie leaves a week from tomorrow. She is the second Katie that I've loved tremendously who's left for Seattle. Her man is taking her away, and after some time I accepted that he is good enough to do such a thing.
We are tribal as they come, the cousins, fiercely hawk-eyed over things like love and those other important things that count. She, of all the cousins, is most like me in that distinct rebel way that Cash recently pointed out, or I like her. For that reason I hope for her more than any of them that she never, ever lose that fire.< Katie and I, with our dad's sameness in common too and all the irreverence and dirty smarts, have fought hard to own what it is we've got.

She seriously is one of the raddest chics I know.

Thankfully, her man is fucking rad, too! Hip and honest, wise and most important smart as hell in that clever way that cant be studied, bought or faked.Together I think that they both will help the other in doing their own authentic thing.

That is my prayer for them. And for safe travel blessings, that they remember always the importance in travelling well. Rolling with the punches cuz that's what enlarges the heart, but how that only happens if there's bravery enough to trust. Knowing the inverse relationship between knowing something wonderful's about to happen only coming true exactly because you choose to know it. And trusting, always remembering, in Love. Love within, the choice of this. And that choice is always always always the precursor to chance.
I pray too she remembers, if all else should ever fail, the love and the buoyancy of family and friends.

Travel well sweetones!! Love ya Katie grl xoxoxoxo

New Moon Meditation, in great enthusiasm, of the Future yet to Come!!

'But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money--booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!'

~W. H. Murray in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition

Epistles

Once the sleep kicked in I could’ve slept forever. The streets outside are white, same as the walk & the yard, despite the plow. The sun is out now but there is no place to go. All the trees have bunched branches in clusters hung low to the ground. The first snow started Friday in the afternoon & didn’t stop until late in the night the next day. I checked the streetlight, other side of my window & heavy curtain, about once an hour through the storm. Heavy storms like that sometimes you just look out. Arrested, wordless. It’s what you do.

The second snow started Tuesday & started with sleet drops and rain. I was walking back from Coffee Cat with someone we’d been writing some of the afternoon. The sky was grey in that ominous way the air has of making it seem bigger than the sky. A block from Hanson the first ice drop hit me & then the second, Did you feel that it’s starting I said too quickly & then felt silly bc it betrayed not really the panic but the extraordinary awe I secretly felt. I knew the next storm was going to be a big one. We were snaking our way along a foot path six inches wide in some sections & in some spots that ended in snow banks & put us back on to the street. He came in for dinner, we watched a movie then I sent him on his way bc my place is too small for a sleepover that might last more than one day.

It iced all night & I watched out my window as it changed to snow around 7am the next day. I was awed, but getting nervous, too. Ice on the lines is what brings them down I remember bc of 1999 & the power outages all over Anne Arundel, & three of my boys in the hospital after that, it was late night when I begged them not to drive home.

They called me witchy after the accident but had been doing that for years. It was just how my mom used to do, try to warn me off certain nights, then I’d end up in big trouble. I never listened to her & so it would piss me off like she’d jinxed or cursed me it took me years to get that it wasn’t a jinx just her gut feelings & so finally I started to listen to mine, too.

When the snow did start in the morning I’d been up for four hours already. I put a movie in & when that was over slept on the sofa most of the day. I was up from around 4 in the afternoon til midnight again but didn’t do anything except Facebook & sitcoms on TV. I feel deep asleep at midnight & woke this morning at 10 & could’ve kept going. Sleep felt so delicious to me then, so organic, like marrow to my bones. This elixir is what I’d been running from. I am still under the covers & soft sheets the sun is out some people are walking or shoveling. But this is the deep rest I knew I’ve needed & I hope my neighbors don’t mind that right now there is no place, none, that I want to go.

~~
What I'm listening to: Madeline

Snow, & New Moon

I've been trying to keep it mellow, but where I live right now is getting absolutely pounded with snow. My town got over two feet this past weekend, while my brother, over on the other side of Baltimore City where they're prone to the foothill mountain patterns got over three feet. Last night it sleeted all night and now it's been snowing all day. I've been in my pjs, frumpin, sleeping, snuggly, considering getting up to get a book to read but mostly just loving being this lazy. The college I work for is closed ALL WEEK! Sean my bro just sent this picture, of him on his front walk, with snow up to his shoulder!! Five feet! All over our state municipals are in emergency phases meaning it's illegal to even go outside! Oh Mama--you are something you are something you are something...!

Anyhow. I am safe, and thankfully warm and with my power still on. Tomorrow night is the New Moon. I woke up at 3 in the morning with the February blankness that comes to me. I slid right in to meditation, thankful for the technique of Vipassana I once stumbled on and got to learn, how it helps me keep the edges clean on my mindfulness when I need to sink deep within, remaining equanimous and accepting, just witnessing in deeper and deeper ways the levels of my emotional self. In there, in the deep quiet within, I sat in the February fear that is always lingering and hanging out...the February stunned blankness, easing in to a loving posture of myself much as I could all the way through. Then the Mama, the deep voice was there: all that self-gnowledge that is laying under the demons at our own inner gate waiting, if we want to, to be heard. This new moon is still full of Imbolc energy, and one of the most powerful times for prophecy/reflection/intention setting of the whole year. Now my fears are on the forefront, so I am happy to be being tender as I can with myself today. Loving loving snuggling frumping, and warm and safe, too.

Good time to be snowed in, to get to be still...

Just sayin.

My Favorite Dancing Song

Most mornings I dance, at least a little.

My kitchen is small with not near the counter space I was used to back when I'd cook for our bangly bunch of bandit and banjo-wielding tribe that potlucked and filled my spaces, all the crannies and nooks of my house with their love and music. But in that old kitchen I only danced in those last six months, and usually only bc I forced my self to in order to lift my spirits.

I never danced in the kitchen at Chop, just sometimes alone in my room.

I dance most mornings in my little two room apartment in Easton, in my kitchen with the high wide window, the green curtains that came with the place magicy and hanging down. The magnolia tree outside, green covered in white, winking and staring and smiling back at me. Usually while I'm waiting on my coffee first thing is on goes the radio then up goes the blood in me and now I am dancing, wild, all over, grinning a fat grin just because I can! Dancing and grinnig to whatever is playing on my old boombox on the station from Annapolis.

I dance which is my way of experiencing thanks for all that I've got. Which mostly, I guess, is stuff you cant see. Which means the very reason that I dance comes from the place already dancing, inside of me.

Whatever, I dont mind being cheesy sometimes.

Lately this is my favorite, favorite dancing song.

Turn it up! Dance along!

With that much work in front of you, you just keep shovelling...

The first big snow of the season came the weekend prior to the Solstice, I remember because Rebecca called on the first day of winter to ask if I'd seen the smashed mirror on my car. Some drunk kids vandalized it and fucked it all up. Rebecca is the woman who lives across the hall from me, and I'd only just given her my number the day before when we met for the first time in the street where we live. I met Leslie the same day, she is the single gal that lives in the efficiency on the second floor landing. The three of us, single gals, came together that weekend and helped shovel one another out.

Today I met the gals again on the street. You could not even see my car, it looked instead like one big abysmal drift. The ladies had already cleared much of Rebecca's car and were fast at work on Leslie's. I grabbed the third shovel, and got to work. About an hour or so later, when I was staring at the four foot mound around mine, I found myself immersed suddenly in the joy that comes from solid, hard work. My muscles felt awake and strong, and it made me more aware of the sun on my face and the sweat under my purple snow cap. I worked my shovel under a big load, wiggled it a little, braced my feet and bent at my knees to sturdy myself and lift the pile. I tossed it, the hunk of snow dirty on the bottom from the dirt cleaned loose in the melt, on to the top of an already six or seven feet hill. It fired in me a new determination to finish the job, even though today was way harder than the first big snow because of the additional amount, and because of the ice frozen in the wall compacted by the plow.

Another twenty minutes passed, and I was sweating, and breathing pretty hard. I was getting fatigued. And then, leaning my weight on my foot lodged on the top lip of the metal shovel, I realized something really important. The kind of really important that only matters to you and the measures you periodically take of your own longings and your own heart.

I dont talk about it much, because I am looking forward these days, much as possible. But 2009 was an enormously difficult year for me. I was brand new in a brand new job, responsible for a geographic area that covered several hundred miles--two counties plus the county where the local Community College I work for is based. The job was under new management, very poorly managed before, and I had enormous messes I was charged with fixing. I moved off the huge farm that I lived on, and left the man that I lived with for 6 years. Right after, I got in over my head with a too hasty romance with one of my very best friends, and hurt his heart and mine, and worse, ended up losing the friendship as result. The same weekend that my best friend rightly ended it with us--the guy I lived with for 6 years let me know he was moving off the farm. So for an entire month I worked the crazy job, and in every second of my spare time I helped him sort through and part with six years of our life together, a lot of belongings. After that long of domestic life, I came out with just a few boxes of stuff. I spent the summer just sort-of stunned. Quiet. Sitting for long, long times in the sun and swimming in the ocean. I did a lot of inner-work, lots of old emotional stuff, unloaded lots of old baggage and sorted through a lot of stuff I never wanted to have to look at about myself. I got close with my family again. I relied, and was moved again and again, by the consistency and tenderocity of my amazing friends.

There were so many days that started in tears, or sobs, really. Me beseeching myself to get up out of bed, or off my meditation chair, and keep going. So many days that I didn't think I could possibly get through til the sun went back down. I know it sounds dramatic, but that's just how it was. That's what happened, over and over, and that's how it felt. It was pretty awful, but I somehow I kept showing up, day after day, doing what was in front of me, doing what had to get done. The Choptank River, her being there and the way she sounded without audible sound, kept me going. Somehow.

When I moved to Easton I just kept telling myself, this is it, up these two flights of stairs, a couple more trips, a couple more carloads, this is it, keep going keep going keep going. It was just Amy that helped me move in. The first week I didn't even unpack, or have a bed, I literally just sat around dazed, smiling a lot. I was so happy to be only three minutes from my office, surrounded by life downtown, and most of all in a space that was mine.

It was my third move in less than a year.

So there I was today, shovelling. Fatigue setting in, the sun priming me, heating the line of sweat between my skin and longjohns. And here's the thing, and it probably sounds silly, but it's what happened. It never occurred to me give up. Not once.

Silly, maybe. But it's a spirit thing, the difference in me that I saw. I was flagging, sure, but knew that I could easily keep going, no matter what. I am looking forward right now, looking in to my future and intending to go after the things to me that mean the most. In this book I am reading, Shantaram, one of the characters says that we have to earn our future. She likens it in this way to love, says that that's what love is--a way of earning the future.

I'm not sure about that, other than to say that caring for myself, showing up again and again to my life, on behalf of me, has earned me in my own meaningful way, my life. It's such a settling sense, a ground inside on which I have found that is mine, and defines at once not just where, but how I stand. It was so gratifying today to look up, the blue sky, the white sun, Rebecca lifting and hunnh-ing with each shove of snow, Leslie wiping away sweat. I was so proud of us. I'm so proud of me.

Download, A Winter Dream

I want to be brave, to tell the truth. Salinger's dead and his quote that led me through the first phase of submission--submitting to my novel just to the idea of it again and again telling the truth--comes to me comes to me comes to me again. I think about poetry, the first language I have spoken began when I was 11 and my voice first was took, but I think about my journals, too, I got them all out this morning from a box they littered my floor but looked like gold, like the backroom of the Queen's palace, the one other side of her sitting room beyond her grand parlor even on the other side of the place she goes to sleep, kept hidden where no one else gets to see, only herself, her magic potions dust and curtains kept there, the fire by her bed, the lace and all that is bitter and sweet, the lover she sometimes lets enter and slumber by her side.

And Wordsworth showing up again and again, in meditation yesterday in the morning and later notioned back to his willowy romance by the end of the day and so It sings and sings again we have given our hearts away a sordid boon & always the inaudible line that taunts me beyond there: Will you return, none too soon? And I get it I hear You this, this Thing in me, this Impulse driven me as long as I have record, long as I have me to look back upon--so I never took it seriously? So that I never did? I know what it means to have to delve the depths of me, to have to go beyond to see what I can see. Cmon fucking Innisfree?? How much that wrenched act detests me and yet that is it, is always the movement, the Decesnt-tion lingered there in my soul & on my meditation chair Fleurs de Mal and it no wonder he too bemoans this, The Irrereparable: this long Remorse. And then I laugh!! I laugh with fangs caught dead in this winter cold the freeze meant to flame provincial heat, my teeth meant to gleem. Of course his Muse is Sorceress, of course the wound distinct likened to the back- ended pain, archerer with no arrows left but sleeping adeptness swift and certain should ever it be praised: Wake Up! Woman. O sorceress, O Goddess, both blessing and cursed both wicked, and full of hymns. I got the green journal out, had to dig a long long while it was all the way to the bottom of the box. And of course there what I am looking for is the essay first wrote, green journal one that came from Kelly in the late summer of 2002, out of college when first I decided for good, this is it this is it so shall I be...so am I a Writer.

And instead what I tumbled upon not even knowing it was there yet again the force of Him. And so this is what I am left with, always to reconcile: where are the Voices, where are the sleeping hymns? No no no Kelly not where, but what. O woman, deep down in Who I Am. And tale of my own martyr, my own post held: Victim. My own sin. In meditation this morning it was this Truth meant to tell. It's like the memories of fires that burnt me are still that close. I want to tell about everytime I put it down, threw away my purple boots, threw away my leather jacket, left it all out by the dump.

I want to tell about why and how I keep picking it back up.

Journals and letters and poems and so much heart, even when I let it go it's still all there--I think about volunteering at the Family Support Center in Kent so long ago. The first teaching job they had to force me in to I didn't study education and especially not ESL. That night in the country back of farmland that stretches all the way to Delaware and Mr. Ochoa and his little family and later how they took me home for chicken she fresh slaughtered, in Maryland eight or nine of my students together living in a place with a dirt floor. Clothing hanging on nails where the walls were able to take them, cracks from the metal rammed in run to the floor. And this is Poetry...Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth...This this is the heart of the World. And it hurts me to go in so deep and it hurts me not too, too. So you're right, CB the Muse is the Guignon. You dont confuse ink with virtue? What do you think extracting beauty from evil is?? Little tramp whose virtue is the death march...She who sings and swallows wide and whole the death march and the aching pain, the great awful tearing comes with birth. And I, victim too, bc I hate the fact that it all hurts so much. Not what matters most, what matters at all, what is true. It is more difficult to love God than to believe in him. Who, friend, who does that make the Devil then? And sluffed off your shoulders this responsibility with the arrogant gesture left to those who have some reason to confuse good deeds with fine language. Ahhhhh, ooooo the wit of man: how dutiful responsibility becomes apocryphal.

I dont know how...ahh but no, see, I like you lie, still. It's not that I dont know how, it's that I hate to be charged with having to put it all to words.

Continued Comments, on What Makes a Poet Last

This is copied and pasted from a breif convo via comments over at Stoning the Devil.

Kelly said...
alright. the more i think about specifically what you were getting at here(in that i applied my own more loose context of doubling, as in having layered meaning rather than a secondary character-as-theme) and particular to the idea of impoverished contemporary poetry, and in thinking about my responses to the five questions of the most recent post: what consitutes good poetry?

1:28 PM

P.F.S. Post said...
Good question. There is no definitive answer.

How about answering the question with another question: why have the Romantic "Big Six" lasted?

What traces are in their poems that cannot be effaced?

Adam Fieled

And here is my response, since I felt a little indulgent leaving all this on his blog:

you poor stranger apologies in advance i process and better understand my own thinking/opinions/thoughts by writing, so do pardon this long long rambling response.

isn’t that just it? they were the voice of the undercurrent of their time. in other words not necessarily anti-industry but pro-nature. what the common folk were still about. wordsworth was a pagan for christ’s sake. lyricism was valued not necessarily bc of the eloquence of the soft language but bc it was pro-romance (romance defined here as a style, thus romance the vehicle, used symbolically: style that is anti "mechanics", words on a page symbolic in form of being different then all that is devout/stringent and therefore leading to mechanism/industry.) which makes them no different then the ex-pats in paris that spoke words of the undercurrent after the war, hem and his posse. later allen g and the boys will be huge, too, and lasting. five years ago who the frick was o’hara? but here come more and more of allen g’s stuff to the modern stream and brighter and brighter his posthumous light, longer and longer the shadow of he, and his pals, allure. for real, the ones that stick around are the ones who voice the words of the ppl in the streets. but more importantly they’re the ones with background enough (i’m talking education here, higher-ed, which makes this not a complete convo without talk then of money/classism) to have the connects to get in to the mainstream where the establishment can pick them up and apply aristocratic virtue to them. (here's where i go off on the absent voice of ethnicity in the revered language of contemporary art. the xenophobia and misogyny inherent in this remains then our final frontier--which leads somewhat in to some of my thoughts on your 5 questions…) yea the recession will breed innovation as it always does. but, deconstructionalist as i am, it will be modernism that will deliver us: the internet. where finally the Voice, the voice of all ppl, not just by and large the lasting voice of academic whites (like you and I---eeeeek forgive me, there I said it!!) will have equal-opportunity to level the playing field.

Thanks Adam for allowing that splurge...

From Letters to A Young Poet

Man, I just wrote the longest post ever, the kind that made me feel turned-out from the inside, flexed, stretched, fully-expelled with the hairs of my capillaries outreaching for a dance in the sun. Or the snow storm, as it were.

Guess that's all that really matters, hmmm? Since it got erased when I tried to post it.

That's only happened one other time, a long esoteric post from years ago when I was still on the farm, all about LSD the Merry Pranksters etheric wounds and generational vibrations, and acting our destinies unconsciously from our DNA. Too much witchywisdom at once for one hot shot to the blogosphere!? This post I just lost had secrets that maybe I wasn't really ready to give out...

The snow just started in Easton. I am at the Coffee Cat, writing. In my car is a home-made blueberry pie from the Amish Market. People there, unlike the Acme, or Foodlion or Wal-Mart, unlike the streets of downtown, were mellow, smiley, moving slow.

I am not going to include the links, thoughts and intentions that my post-lost-to-the-ether included. Instead I will give you this, from Letters to A Young Poet by Rilke. And I will say also that the Mama told us this, if we were listening, about the snow. Back September when Fall first got here, under the moon. Farmer's Almanac too says it will come and come through March. Mama says it just cuz we need a good deep rest, lots of time to listen. Which means come Equinox and tide-changing in March, there will follow lots and lots of time to grow....We'll either be prepared, or not!

Fine by me, I'll be writing!

You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all--ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must ," then build your life according to this necessity...

Ocean City in the Storm

I thought I'd post something a little different. OC got a foot this weekend. Check out this link. Sounds like we're in for even more tmrw?? Lots of writing for me.......

She aint crazy she right

Here is a poem that I opened up to and just read as means of ritualizing the end of my very productive last two hours of writing writing writing. I like it bc it called out to me, from the same place of illustrious space within where the heart light glows, called out to and moved me in there so that when I opened the book this is the poem that fell out before me.

I like it a ton, also bc it is the theme of my life. In that double sense way all language has that is the very reason I love love love writing-as-art-as-craft-of-life. Or it was the theme of my life, but now, in celebration, no more no more no more....

Poem to end my day, by Sharon Olds

Everything
Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born--
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes--the earth, the firmament--
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.

Yup.

Beautiful Friday in Baltimore

For my birthday when I turned 16 my mom dropped off a carfull of me and my friends at some random pad on St. Pauls St in Bmore for a show featuring S.Q.U.I.D. They were formerly Mustard Seed Magic and truly, when I write that I still get a little magic tingle in me that reminds me of sandalwood and vintage stores and Eastern Ave. We got in trouble that night with mom and didn't open our mouths the rest of the drive home because we smelled like beer and weed, even though between the four or five of us there probably was only a six pack and a pinner or two that got finished. But o god that night, the punk rock Xerox's stapled all over the lightpoles, my purple doc martens, all that music that matched the city streets and I remember feeling so cool. But being tough about. It was Baltimore, anarchy dreams, riot grrrl zines, DIY. I mean c'mon, it's way not cool to talk about being cool.

This Friday I have a date with me. I am so stoked about it, Beautiful Friday. I used to do those back in college, my senior year, that first year I was getting clean. I lived upstairs from Amy in CHestertown and sometimes she wouldn't have heat, or electric, and her and her baby would come up and I would feed them on my then-vegetarian-diet of whole grain noodles apples and kale. And blue cheese cuz that's what Amy liked. And since that's what it was, me and Amy trying to stay clean and me and Amy helping each other with that, and also me trying to finish college, and work two jobs all at once, when I read the idea that year about dating me it made real good sense. So that's what I did, and I started calling it Beautiful Fridays and it was the day that was to me, for me, and only me. I guess because back then I didn't have have class on Friday and I remember that I didn't have to work at the coffee shop on Fridays, either. Just Pussers on Friday night, if they needed me/there was money to be made.

So everything superfreakincool that could possibly happen is happening this Friday and I am no longer too cool to talk about it or pretend like I dont care. I am so excited! Me and me, on a date doing way rad free stuff in the city which is my home. Making me not only on my way for a date with me, but with Baltimore, too:

The whole thing started with exhilarated cartwheels over learning about Puss Fust, an all girls exhibition at a gallery called Open Space. But I emailed them to get their hours and found out that they've already started to uninstall. Which would be, or actually still is, a serious bummer except for by the time I'd settled on Beautiful Friday this week I was so glittergoldenbowsin myhairexcited that I couldn't turn back, and so am equally stoked to go instead to the John Waters photo exhibit at C. Grimaldi's. If for some reason you are too un-kitschy or devoid of trashisness and therefor perhaps rather boring, and you dont know who John Waters is, please kindly go here. (Ehem, Sammy.) Then there is the tough choice between this screening at The Patterson, and this reading at Atomic Bookstore. Whaaaaaaa?

I can't even imagine what this beautiful date of mine will choose. What will she wear? I wonder if she'll like me?

I must say, I am looking wildly forward to finding out.