Decision, have I made you?!

There is a red flower growing up out of the brown mud in the canal in our backyard.

It is wild, and there is only one.

There is a flower growing up out of the canal, I have been watching it for the past month, it lives longer than all the others, it's color is passion red.

There is a flower in the yard, there is a coffee mug I always drink from.

It's feeling is stability, this mug in my hand.

This is the backporch where I love to breathe and feel the air and here is the fall, it is right there, it is everywhere, it is inside of who I am. I am up early and thinking of the words I will use to write back to Paul.

There is Diane diPrima reading in Mass the first weekend of October and a road trip I can feel my soul taking down mid-Cali 101.

There are men. It is always there, there is always so much having to do with men.

Lust and attention-seeking. Sexual preciousness and being. Alive. Being alive and instinct to procreate and great fear and great nesting drive to settle down. Unity of balance. Life love game and every gentle sweet-soaked step. Not lying to yourself best you can even when for a while the choice is to quiet your self down.

And then, there is cutting down to the core. The true bones that pre-exist all else. The life-frame meant to call upon, own and name, before the acts of fleshing out your life's true matter of things can really begin.

And of course, there is waylaying yourself, pretending you dont have a say!

All of this making decisions. Integrity. Being human. Dishonesty. O loving human. Humility. O human heart. Breaking: finding your own swing, yet again.

There is the time in-between when it's perfectly right, when there is reason to be astounded within and say yes to the slip-slide away. To say yes to the long retreat, the acquisition of your self by allowing yourself to disappear. For purposes of re-generation. For means of which to germinate, sprout, steadfastly throw down roots, and grow.

It is fall out and things are falling. The sun retreats, turns yellow, puts its coat on but never truly says alright I'm out, I really gotta go. Just runs far away a while, to a sweet strung lonely corner where it can look its self in its own dim eye. All the while this is stillness, stillness the most complete, the most difficult, the most important of all the growing. These are the seasons. On the table there are flowers, cut and vased, and a checked yellow table cloth stained with summer's dirt. Mom has a broken foot. I have a cold that's moved to my chest and makes me strain with boxed pressure when I try to deep breathe. We all have duties to resume where they were left off, again. Always: again again again. My mom and I are so alike it makes me cringe and it makes me ache. This seed it goes on, this sun that shines sometimes it hurts my eyes.

A wedding is coming. Sean will be married in less than eight weeks. Less than seven, soon almost less than six. My stomach twists a little as I write this. I am selfish, jealous, human, imperfect. There is always this.

I thought I did. Want to be married. Thought I was looking for a man. I am, one to keep me company, have dinner with and be able to talk to and sometimes sit up all night in front of the tv. But it is true, I am not ready to settle down. It startled me, to come up with this, though I suppose I've known it all along. I thought I was, this is lonliness and giddiness of un-expectation? The truth, I've never not once not one time, not ever, seen a man with me in the when I've visioned the next stage in which I am about to take part. And the men know it first when we meet, when we're together, know it better than me. It always surprises me and shocks me and then the shock mildly turns me on when someone knows something of me better than I know it of my self. Which the reverb can then last longer than the initial passion itself was even worth. Which of course can be fun, or can be hurtful. Such is the game. That is the thing with openness, vision is better retrospectively. It's not always easy to see what you're doing when you want to be in the moment best you can.

And so there is this one last thing. All the plate clearing I've done, getting rid of everything so I can make my pick, my main and primary one.

All of this widening of vision, so that I could strictly funnel and tunnel it now and focus, with my own most direct and personal vision, my scope.

Kelly there is absoloutely nothing wrong with owning your own path, for you and just you, even if it looks solitary and you are 33! 33 is young today, kid. And I am a teacher, and youthfulness of spirit is so far the best way I've found to live.

And to live, what I finally and only know is that there is this. These words, sacred journeymates, sacred harbingers and detailed archives of my sometimes muddy soul. There are flowers, sometimes only one. There are roots, in the fall.

They get fed.

They run so deep.