O Elvis, when to you I said the Prayer. Chester River Runoff @ Seacrets and other Myths and Dreams.

Mandy and I were in Memphis at Elvis'.  It was 2007 and we were on a 48-hour mission to get to an army base in Texas, I can't remember if Graceland happened before or after we stayed straight where we should've merged and next thing you know wound up in Alabama, or Arkansas, one of the A states not sure which but one otherwise not on our route.  We drove that route-not-really-our-route til the sun went down and purple twilight was everywhere and the road became a single lane, cutting through cotton fields with white puff-drifts breezing along the edges and high and thick in the side of the ditch.  Finally soon after that we were out of the car laughing, laughing so much at the middle of nowhere deep south cotton field that our road laid down before us, laughing and picture-taking and story-telling, a non-stop MandyKelly fury of redbull and flavored mini-cigars.

Mandy and me, before Red Bull existed.  Different Spontaneous Trip.  Domenical, Costa Rica.  Dec 1996.

Later, or before, or at any rate whenever it was that we made it to Elvis', I made an exaggerated deal about Graceland being my wedding gift to her.  It seemed right, it seemed epic, it seemed of the epochs, it seemed mythic as Mandy and I were then and always are to me.  To go visit the house of Elvis, the King, is what I mean.  Neither of us were Elvis fans, necessarily, but both of us found ourselves so moved by his timelessness, by the legacy of him, the specific honey-magic he generated that we were weepy again and again.

Last night Chester River Runoff played here in OC.  They opened for a band called The Electric Company's CD release and the whole thing started with the boys live on Ocean 98 playing the Live Lixx show. 

CRR, On the Big Screen.  Ocean City, April 2011.

In November, at the same big club, in the same corner up near the same stage where we always go Jotto and I were dancing like mad to a typical OC cover band.  I rooted my high-heeled feet down through the hydro-bouncing stage, I loosened my stance in Mountain Pose so my spirit hung gentle and witnessed easy and soft as a wild rose. O heart of moon and ocean, let me reign in with your song,  O mama spirit mama la mar mama la luna, mama the wise earth, o all she holds which is all that is here.  O, Life.  I raised my arms in dance, a dance prayer all dance is prayer and I rolled my eyes and beseeched holy Life, said help me dance this mediocrity away.  I twirled and twirled and twirled and whirled and frenzy danced so much like I love to do with Jen.  Later that night, at Mambo's, while Jott was busy in a textbubble that I was judging her for in a funny laughy way, Nate from the Electric Company walked in I didn't even know original bands existed here then and had never heard of his.  It was enough, that one night talk over the seat booth with him who knew and was friends with Sam, of witty, flirty talk.  Enough to keep me rooted in the deeper life myth, the Call.

Elvis is Here.  Graceland, Dec 2010.

O Elvis.  O ELvis, I said and would have grabbed Mandy's hand had she been standing near, O Elvis, we were there at his gravesight Mandy and me, out back of could be GlnBrnieBrklynPrk Memphis, Tennesee. O Elvis now got me Graceland touched, forever Graceland-bound. I wrapped me, wrapped the self the me that touches the timeless heart the heart of all things, touched in the heart of the emotions we felt, Mandy and me.  O Elvis and the sun shined and there he lay, and it was still and beautiful, O wrap my friends in the same big spirit myth the one you've evoked here today in me.  O Elvis and Angels who looked so happy on him bless them, bless them please. I brought them there, I summoned Walsh then, the boys from Chester River, I summoned The Took and Josh and his Parade, too. 

Rocking Chair.  Ben's Farm, February 2009.

Last night CRR played Molly's song. About too many sunny days and I went up near them close as I could to them, my old tribe of mad genius men, my old friends.  To have with them a moment for her where it was peace.  My friend of the precious wanderer tribe, poet-spirit sister of things too big for this world to see.  They wrote that song before death took her and I was in Oregon when that happened last June and couldn't be part of the ritual Ben and Sam arranged that said goodbye.  They played her song and I closed my eyes and kept them closed for long and let the song be a prayer of thankfulness for it all: and in that time there in Morley Hall with the songs and dance-prayers to follow me the wild grl me came back on me and in my happy bluegrass dancing in my wedge spring high heels I actually was the myth of then, the myth of us the myth of how it all came to be.  Country as hell, country wild as I used to be, I had barefeet and there a great bonfire in the mad brickpit with flames as high as six feet and there tall pine trees and there a stage in front of a late harvest corn field and there middle of the night christmas lights on the tree branches and on the grape arbor hung just so, and there all the music, all my friends, all the fresh grown food the pot luck kitchens the river the naked swimming, there the ever-witnessing big white full moon.  That one solstice at Ben's farms on our backs in her the Chester the river silk and moon milk on our summer tanned river skin. Running in the wild dark and leaping in.  Dancing and hamming and jamming and there two in the morning shadows on the backlit sky,  wooping the wild spirit wild as it used to be, fresh rockfish fresh corn fresh herbs bike rides coffee shops genius madness, poetry, wild as it still is because it Was and all that is is from, always, what used to be.

Goose Blind.  Chester River @ Ben's.  Febraury, 2009.

I thought of Elvis then, and my prayer to him back then for these my sacred friends.  I remembered November, same dance hall different dance--of desperation--the night that I first met Nate when I forgot but he was sent by Life as Reminder all that comes passes, to come back in different ways again.

I blessed Myth then, thought of Mandy and all my precious wild women-grls, I danced some more and loved my friends and loved even more the perfect timelessness in the heart, the Heart of the heart, the heart that lives inside us all and that I am thankful cuz I live it for sure, its gift of livingness inside me.

One is as if everything is a miracle...

Haa...Einstein said this.  "There are only two ways to live this life, one is as if nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is..."  I like this, it's serendipity to me, or what Erika and I call Nous.  My life just goes better when I center in the morning, gently love myself in to being and get to the still place to watch the crazy screen of my mind. 

Afterwards, this was the first song on my Moon Poems, Mama of the Stars station on Pandora today.  By the Be Good Tanyas, Opal's Blues:

Ain't lookin' forward

and I ain't lookin' back

Aint' lookin' forward

and I ain't lookin' back

Lordy, seem like every hour

sure gon' be my last

Minutes feel like hours

hours feel like days

Minutes feel like hours

and hours feel like days

well the wind is a-risin'

and the trees begin to sway

I wake up each mornin' and

watch the sun go down

I wake up each mornin' and

I watch the sun go down

I got find a reason just to hang around

I'm a sweet little rider

I'm lighter than the wind

lighter than the wind

I'm lighter than the wind

lighter than the wind

lighter than the wind

lighter than the wind

I been a sweet little rider

since I don't know when


Inside the still place, where the wonder lives, the joy is born, the poetry issues, from here I set intentions--and I am going travelling!  So lately the intention is gratitude for the harmony I choose to let guide my day.  In the past 24 hours I've made a decision that will impact all this, so let me tell you...Life.   You're funny.  Thanks for the serendipitous nod~

Spon Down. Living forever on yoga and sun.

Mom called to say she had a long day at the hospital. It's in Baltimore City where she works once a week as an operating room nurse, her case load long or intense or maybe her coworkers lousy--she called to say she's staying the night in Anne Arundel county at Deb's house instead of driving back to the beach.  She's worked there as long I've been alive.  I was writing, doing third edits on Part One of my book, so that Part Two comes with more consistency, when she called.  We talked a serious bit of talk about something that struck me last night, that I meditated on it struck so deep, and she agreed with the serious bit in the tiny little time that we talked.

Her call made me pause, there was lots of food in the fridge and I couldn't ignore my hunger when we got off the phone.  I peeled shrimp and added Old Bay and a little little dash of sour cream to make it shrimp salady.  Then I heated corn tortillas and got out arugula and limes and cilantro because everything's better as tacos of course.  I am writing again now, not on Part 2 or Part 1 third edits, just writing to write to acknowledge the time the good music on and to say goodbye to the ohsowarmtoday golden yellow sun.  I love the gold yellow of the spring, just before it turns summer orange.  I love that I am getting browngolden skin and yellowgold hair like twine Rapunzel spun.

Last week right now I was walking through a rich part of DC with a belly full of Thai food and my best friend Katie by my side our sandled feet on the uneven cement sidewalk squares.  It was chilly in the air but still we drove with the windows mostly down on our way to the hostel in Tacoma.  We met a girl named Shemma from the UK, it is hard not to meet people in hostels when you decide that where you are that night--a boarding house for passerbys--is where you will plant for the moment and stay.  Which is to say the next night at the hostel in my favorite neighborhood in Baltimore, Mt. Vernon, we didn't plant, just dropped our bags fitted our sheets and scooted back out the door to all the fun ways to explore the going-ons of my hometown city's streets.  Shemma is young, like 22 or 23, and from the UK and instead of on a round-the-world trip tic had one in which you can go right up to eight times.  Neat new concept I'd never heard.  They were on their last stop, her and her man who she just got engaged to, this happened in the beginning of their trip on a stop somewhere in Asia I think.  Now we are facebook friends.

The day after the hostel in Tacoma we went back downtown to meet Walsh and see the Gaughan exhibit.  I put all my intensity in to it until I was exhausted from the concentration. Later we laid on a blanket on the green mall under the shade of new fresh green leaves.  We talked inappropriately like women always eventually do.  Making the day irreverent and lovely. Today I wrote four poems I am sure came from time with my grls.

Last night I was driving home from yoga it was warm out so warm the air was like hot breath breathing off the trees and some song came on Ocean 98 that I can't now remember and I thought all I really need in life is music, yoga and sun.  I smiled a while and vibed whole and strong on the bliss of this, then funny ego twist thought: and poetry, too--poetry the ocean music yoga and sun.  And friends.  And sex...a man. I thought ohmylord like Marla would say...I laughed at myself....this too this too came to mind, what Dani Shapiro would say.  Always the ego and all its unsatiated needs.  I thought of Erika then, my published-by-Penguin writing partner sister spirit friend.  I thought of Walsh and Katie, of Josh and then Mike in California because Sean my brother was home all weekend so it's natural to think also of him.  Life is funny, ununderstandable, impossible to figure out and also so fleetingly crystal clear with certain truths.  I could live forever on sun, poems, yoga.  Music, fresh tacos, swimming and friends.  Road trips to museums and hostels in my hometown.  Best friends, sisters, grlfriends, men.  Like I already do now.

I am writing, I am happy right now.  I was going to save this post for tomorrow, some new day with all the new this too's it shall bring, but why bother when it's so luxuriously right now...

Meditation, on Time. Revolutionary Letter # 74.

by Diane diPrima

June 12, 1982
for Fulcanelli & John Lennon

There is always            the fire.         Downward it
blows our eyebrows off, blows holes
in our dusty skin.         In the crucible
it melts our faces in to knots & puddles
It melts our hearts.  And they become rock or
something more feeling than flesh.    There is
no way around it, it is         there is
always
             the fire.   Is this alchemy?   Must
the process pass thru
                                 10, 000 suns?   There
has never been a way
around
          the crucible.       Can the heat
of our love excel
                          tangible flame? Only then
can this crucible
                          replace
                                      the old.  There are
even in alchemy 'two ways' and this
our way can supplant
habits of war.        It is
                                   'the dry way'
                                                        (no blood,
no tears)     only
                          substantial presence,
my hand in yours.
                            And you are a stranger.
                                                                There are no
strangers.      Now.
                           This transformation
by the Inward Fire
                           (our heat  /  our love)
                                                            no
charred limbs, blistered eyeballs, brain
turned to steam
                        only
                               the Inward Fire,   slow
combustion  /  quick change  /  tomorrow
is already here.

BEST NEWS EVER!!

This is Erika Robuck. 

  @Brasserie Brightwell, Easton.  April 2011.

She is my writing partner, the sole reason I am where I am today.   What I mean is I am a writer, a poet, a phoenix.  I create my life, me, over and over and as result my art follows, much as it too leads me through.  There is zero separating out any of this ebb or flow.  I recognize the sync of Life as a whole because of this identity I claim, I recognize the rhythms, the cycles that push and propel and at times stand still, the whole of all of Life itself.   

from the street, Erika Writing.  Annapolis, March 2010.

Erika is the first person to ever wholly commit to this journey with me, as I have undertaken to the same with her.  We call this process Nous.  Well the process, at just the right Time, has paid off...

Erika Robuck has accepted a two-book deal with Penguin books!

Look for Hemingway's Girl, to be released some time in 2012...

And, now that I can finally mention it without crying, I could not be more thrilled, excited, and endlessly honored for my partner, my sister, my teacher and my friend.

Congratulations grl.  You so, so deserve it.  (aaack, tears...!) To Nous, my dear~that it never ends~

 @ our high school, Severn, MD.  Speaking on her first book,
the self-published, Receive Me Falling. May, 2009.

I vow to finish strong.

...and take extra, gentle care of me in the process...

"All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your nature so specially fits for you--that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you.  It will surely come to you.

Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come.  All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference.

Therefor do not begin that game at all..."

~Edward Carpenter  1844-1929

with the grls, National Gallery, DC

I am going on the road.

14 April, 2006


When I was fifteen I went to California for the first of several times and to this day, regardless of the Coast that I am on, the sense and the feel of it has not changed and will visit upon me at the most unexpected moments. For this reason, when I graduated college a couple of years back and took a trip to Southern California to celebrate and got off of the plane and stepped into that warm delicious air and soaked up the reds and purples of all the great big flowers beating and breathing and just living all over the place, my heart leaped and tumbled as it does with that kind of sensory delight and I realized: California is a state mind. And so it was that I made a decision to carry with me this perception in my heart, and I began to practice what I call perception appreciation, easily done in any setting at absolutely any time: to concentrate on the joy of being fully in the moment, assured by the precision of leafless branches and the scent of smoke on the air mixed up with the cold salt from the river on an otherwise drab winter day, or simply dazzled by the gold light on the tree tops that stretch above the buildings in the courtyard behind the restaurant where I work as the sun goes down, when for a moment I can pause, await customers, breath in the burgeoning breath of spring and allow myself to Joy, to experience the simple and miraculous purity of being alive in this moment...

This is the intro to an essay wrote for a newsletter called The Oregon Dialogue that I created and self-published from January 06 through the fall of that year.   My ex-boyfriend Brandon and I spent a year living on the road, allowing serendipity--literally our instincts--to lead us on a journey through North America.  The harmony of it, the unfolding of one thing leading to the next so seamlessly and each next step being exactly what we needed in the process of perception-changes we were undergoing...it was absolutely undeniable.  The Oregon Dialogue was a result of that in-to-our-own-hearts experience: a newsletter meant to unify people drawn towards a more authentic, meaningful and connected experience in life.   We gathered folks around it.  We got back to Chestertown, tilled a huge organic veggie garden put in an enormous fire pit and I proceeded to do what I do best, socialize and make people feel included.  It was my goal to create a movement around those ideals and we did, catalyzed by sharing ourselves through culture, music, art, all on the local level.   It too extended in to social responsibility and sustainability.  Local agriculture, local goods, farm potlucks and how to be the change you wish to see in practical, fun ways.
 
That trip with Brandon really started in the fall almost a full year before we left.  It started because my blood began to draw and pull, especially when I would write.  It was none other than that: a wordless need to go.  My poems from that time are full of green trees and mountains, of apocalyptic vision and going deep within to recreate, to recreate both me and my outter reality.  They are prophetic, full of dreams of Oregon and the shamanistic encounters that I eventually underwent on the road.

That essay from the Dialogue was about living the moment for what it is worth.   I wrote it in the very beginning of what would become a desperately hard time for me, and I am sure I was trying to write my way in to belief.  I do very much believe that living this moment is what it is about, however the tough part is learning that this moment begins with where you are at, however that may look or feel and not how I think I should be.  So truth is, the appreciation of this moment can be a challenge, especially if you, like me, try to paint it pollyanna-positivity and call it Hope.  That period of hardness lasted almost four years for me, and through it all I left not just Brandon but also my carreer.  I feel differently about hope today as I learned that it can be a false concept.  I think it can, depending on the application, allow us to lie to ourselves, giving way to all forms of righteousness and confusion that roots from self-deception.  Sometimes the bottom line is that the only one who can change your life is you and trying to control, through the false-pretense of forced optimism or even genuine gratitude can and does cause frustration and even depression.  Happiness starts where you're at, but that's about softening and being understanding with yourself.  It starts with accepting the truth about how you're really feeling, doing so without judging you, and in-moment satisfaction comes from this self-acceptance even if its aggravation or hopelessness that needs to be accepted... It starts by owning what you really want, even if you're far far from it.  Not by layering on some optimism, which I learn and re-learn.  Hoping for a better day and doing the same old shit is plain straight victim mentality, even if on the best days we label it martyr and believe it's for some higher good. 
 
There is no explanation if, like mine, you have blood that wordlessly pulls.  I don't have to tell you what it means: the misery of trying to go against the flow.  I don't fight it anymore.  It just is me, and it's a gift to live and feel that deep.  I got rid of all my stuff last week, literally set up a trinket-bauble-clothing-fabulous free store in my living room Tuesday night and let the girls from work have at it.  When I left on my trip with Brandon I always knew I'd be back, I just did. I didn't think I could leave my family, all my cousins, behind.  But now, I'm headed to California.  I might not be back.  Everyone's on skype, and most of them live elsewhere now anyway.  The West Coast's in my blood, it's calling.  I have to listen, and the joy that comes in knowing I am heeding to my own pull is riding me high through my days.  

On the road. Bear's Rock, WY. July 5, 2004.

It is nighttime here at the campground at the foot of Bear’s Rock, or Devils Tower as we know it, Bear’s Rock as it has been referred to for far longer than 1906 when this strange rock protrusion became the first US National Monument. Brandon wanders the prairie off to my left, the sun not a shadow in the grey & foggy night. There are 2 deer that edge the perimeter of our campground, just close enough to be curious but safe. There are also a number of tipis set-up here, on this long-held sacred spot of ancient and todays native’s land.



I am writing to overcome my complacency, to capture some memories before they become a final & swift blur & because I feel artsy & cramped & need to commune with myself.


The west has done some kind of # on my head. Left me far more perplexed than anything else—all while in such deep admiration of this country—literally: of the great & beautiful, exploited or rescued, gawked at instead of honored LAND. The question, nagging, ripping me up with its insinuations. American. What does it mean?

Back east we have the legacy of slavery that still smacks its physical presence, a generally unacknowledged & quiet pain all around the small towns still segregated. I claim open-hearted and mindedness but can’t, on some days, walk own the street in Chestertown without tromping along my own self part of the sludge of the violent & belittling white mans past. It is what happens to my mind without my consciousness—on days when I am unable to see and instead note the color of a person’s skin or the unchecked assumption of where they live. I, immobile in the vestiges of a history that continues to blind and bind our present day, terrorized by the truth of people still subordinate, suffering, deprived & most of all, unheard or seemingly unrecognized.


In utter disbelief of me of who I am I try unsuccessfully to break out of the sludge I challenge myself what is it like to be in the heart to have the blood of someone here who doesn’t have white skin.


Ahhhh, then to come west. First, the effigy mounds after crossing the Mississippi out of the charming pleasant Galena, Illinois original home of Ulysses S. Grant. An effigy mound, Ancient mounds built for honor and ritual by long ago native peoples, these relics some of which dating back to BC time and destroyed, many, by the settlers who thought A) Indians to be too primitive & savage to be capable of such construction & B) felt land to be much more measured by its profitability that its juncture of Still=Sacred. On the Big River scenic drive in Iowa there is history, some mounds still in tact, and me, this is me, part of My History. And all this, all this after the long drive across Route 3 in southern Canada, the truck stops every 5 to 10 miles Oh Ontario and your oldskool Americana your 50’s diner food, all this after the strange majesty of Niagra turned so cheaply in to plastic-replica amusements, cardboard-packaged preservatives expensive tourist toys and plasiticine goods. These mounds, my Americanism, I American Witness, American Aggressor of the cruel destruction, cultural obliteration, ohhh plastic-sided homogenization my Free Heritage, my all powerful all-American Hands.


From Michigan through the heavy traffic outside Chicago & the touching urban sprawl of a melting pot in procession on 83 & finally onto 22 where we stopped for a small time farmland carnival in the middle of the fields of Illinois. Onward across Iowa.


And camping in Crystal Lake off Route 9 & the gorgeous headwaters of Iowa’s great rivers against the fertile green rolling grounds. Effigies: beer can empties, candy wrappers, diapers and paper towels. Little lost wishes all about the campgrounds, at the far end a group of farm boys in jacked-up pick-ups, blared music, drinking beers, leaving their trash on the ground all through the night still there in the day times telling light.


We got in to South Dakota, Siox City that evening on 52. I treated us to Mexican in celebration of being out of Iowa. Out of Mitchell next day and now we switched to 90 highwaying it over the prairie & private ranches and now we were West. Grand sky & rolling country far as the eye could see. Rolling land, rolling America rolling American me. South on 83 to lesser known 44 W across the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Small badlands, yellow & brown now began to replace all the vibrant & rolling green.


And to know the land? TO KNOW the LAND is to be a true Native. True American, I take my nativity by the hand.


Paha Sapa the following day & late in the afternoon in awe tears on the faces of Brandon & I, a herd of Buffalo grazing Buffalo National Grassland, at one time this country was home to 60 million bison, lifelines of all native peoples, today as we witnessed they occupy national parks in the west at numbers of about 160, 000, national parks in some cases which were established primarily to have sanctioned land on which to slaughter buffalo, Grant when he was president leading the task force to disparage the native peoples of their source of worship and food. Onto the Black Hills, sacred land to the natives until gold camps like in Deadwood were set up in the late 1890s to tear apart the inside of these sacred hills dark with ponderosa pines, with coyotes & bison & pronghorns & deer on the outside, whole cherished ecologies living on blood, whole American footprints of God, the Voice of all the lives made to be brought up from the land, us people only ones with consciousness to be her Voice, oh~ America~! American…Land…General Custer park with your namesake, here in the state with more racial profiling on its indian peoples than back east on its blacks.


And last night, me, we, us Americans so blessed—watched a privately funded fireworks display illuminate the rocks of Rushmore in celebration of our National Heritage, our Independence Day, Day of Religious Freedom We Finally Won From England. The fireworks display ignited not just the sky but the hills, the black ponderosa’d hills beneath Rushmore above Herney Peak where Black Elk saw his vision Everywhere is the center of the Universe, the hills of this America set on fire from the fireworks, smoke and fire burning the land on the fourth of July.


I am here, center of the Universe foot of Bear’s Rock, Wyoming. Tents, deers, tipis and me. My land, my people, my American night, my America dream…?

My Hero.

Lucille Clifton wrote a poem called Hag Riding. 

After her, this picture I'm going to call Hag, Rising. I. Love. It.

---

I see the coming change

ah--it gonna be furious!

come!

you unborn children of us

set over!
--and call us home

from the other side.

we need to get grounded
to build the bridges--
for you to walk straight
into safe lands

we are the edge dancers
and bridge constructors
we shall be!
we gonna take responsibility
for our unborn children's future.

from The Bordercrossing Starchild Mission, by Lela Engels, reprinted from We'Moon 2011



Warning.

The mug I get this morning says God Bless America I think about it for a minute before I put my coffee in it like most coffee drinkers I have a ceramic favorite, this is not it, this would never be it, and yet lately it is.

What why because I believe in reproductive rights and protecting and serving the poor I can't believe in God Bless America.  I never get in to it because it's all rhetoric and politicin.  My brother posted outrage on Facebook upset that paperless workers in Maryland get in-state tuition, I paved part of the way when I worked for the college, at least the part that would transition the students, once they were literate in two languages and not just their foreign born tongue, in to training to become nurses, receive their CDL licenses, auto-tech.  Occupational training.   The ugly white privileged arrogance that has no room for a class that's not college-bound or college-raised.  Blindness:  not seeing history for what it is.  A living breathing artifact in our own hands, always in the process of the next change.  The whole idea that because paperless workers are currently not being taxed means they are a drain.  HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK CAPLESS WEALTH IS SUPPORTED??  When they get amnesty, which they will (and you will lock your doors afraid of their brown skin, same as your ancestors did when blacks were let out of chains, projecting hate and fear because it's what's in your, not their, heart) then perhaps we will have an economy a wee more balanced again, but more important, at least in Maryland, the workforce will have closed the gap right here at home by assisting the otherwise ignored segment of our population who are laborers meant to be skills-men or trades-people and not necessarily white-collar, college-bound.  And as if, for example, because I am an educator and a thinker this somehow also means I believe our veterans shouldn't be taken care of?  That because I believe one thing I also believe something else?  If I could I would hold every one of  you soldiers to my breast and mat your hair and help you breathe again.  Half-price groceries the rest of your life and shitty medical care, how bout it!  In exchange for the haunted looks, the sin-stain of all the blood of mother's that could've been yours over there, of kids that played as you once did kicking balls and wearing t-shirts playing in the dirt.  If I could you would get the payment of movie-stars when you returned home.   And their influence, the power they have to get folks to listen, too.

Fuck all those assholes on facebook the liberals the conservatives the tea partyers and the bashing- democrats.  Get out there and BE the change shut the fuck up about what you think.  You think what the dumb-box in your living room and the fright over your retirement plan tells you to.  All your punditing doesn't matter at the end of the day even the choice you think you make: the little check in the ballot box a square black and white box constructed by money that lobbyers pay.  That democratic old white man lobbyers and republican old white man lobbyers.  I'm righteous as hell but at least I know where I stand, can tell my asshole from my own two feet.  

God Bless America, I am about to go out again and worship on her soil.  As I did those years ago.  I am about to go out again and celebrate her land.  She is living and breathing, too, hers are the oceans that wash up on other lands in to other oceans she is wise and in her sacred vision, with her sacred power, sees no difference with all her wisdom she too calls all them her own.  All cards come due.

Erika Robuck at Writer Unboxed.

Erika Robuck is a writer of historical fiction, an excellent resource for contemporary literature and the recent guest blogger at Writer Unboxed.  Her recent post considers the process of inspiration.

38.

What should I write about Nancy I ask her, it is a little past seven at the Java shop at the beach it is just her and I, the early morning calm the jazz music her chicken salad my coffee her capasheeeeno.  Awww mylormybakhurss she says in her accent that I adore.  Write I am a sweeet woomun...she says.  This is what I always write about I think, myself, me me me my feelings my complaints my outlooks my own amping of my self into the day, into life my life my means of downloading my funny frenzy of delightful and nutty brain.  Web-log, origin of the invisible hand voyeur, sacred blog.  Aww my lord, her back hurts, her kid kicked it all night long and her man took up most the bed meant otherwise for the three of them.  Soon she will leave to take her kid Picapoca Little Spicy to daycare and it will be just me.  Just me, the outside hush of water and expanse of grey blue sky that says in the words that are not words Be quiet, I will tell you of the sea. 

Officially, I am counting days.  One month exactly from today is my dinner with my cousins followed by a last night out in Baltimore with friends from home.  37 days from today is the Fleet Foxes show at Constitution Hall in DC with the tickets that cost so much I could fuel my car three times get to Memphis and past there and that's even with inflated gas prices or maybe live for a full month in campgrounds and National Forests across the States.  I think I will skip that show which sucks.  38 days from now I leave, to be a bohemian, to be me, to be wild woman, to be freeee.

How much is that the woman says, then again before I can even respond howmuchdoIoweyou?  I haven't even stuck her bagel in the toaster much less gotten close to the register.  Perhaps she thinks that my glasses equate a calculator in my head and the knife that I cut the bagel with the buttons to do the equations.  What I want to answer: I CAN NOT WAIT TO NOT EVER HAVE TO DEAL AGAIN WITH PUSHY RUDE PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

I break to take the muffins and cookies out of the oven.   Coffee is too acidy for me this morning all that meat at the cookout over the weekend in my muscles foamy protein, I switch to Americano.  The cookies, a peanut butter one, falls apart on the tray so now it is me, my americano jazz music the big sky and a cookie.  And the keys of my computer and its wide-eye fairytale screen.  Nancy's gone, big sky and the air song unsung of the hollering insistent sea.

She was not insistent yesterday she was mostly giggling.   The ocean I mean.  I needed a day off, a nothing day, yesterday was it.   I took my books and blankets to the ocean.  I traded the day, a day off with nothing, sacrificed writing for the quiet time and rejuvenation:  And This is it, Life gives to you when you give to it and don't make habit so much out of lying about what you really need.  Don't martyr yourself the thoughts of your own needs aren't selfish they're really the only true truth you'll ever know.  Everything else is extension of yourself lying, or begging you to please be honest: reflection.  I needed a break yesterday I took it like I would a cup of coffee or used to a cigarette, drinking in and reflective with the sea.  The wind blew, it always does in the spring.  It blew sand in my ear I laughed and let it sweep in.  Today I come to work and here it is, just me no one else this morning now that PicaPoca's on her way to school:  me, and the time to write.  Me and the blank screen.  Life took care of me usually when I stop whining and surrender it does, it usually does.

Later, now that it is later, the guys came in the head of Public Works and the one who is in charge of all the renovations around here, the actual follow through the design and getting it down.  Thank god for them they keep me sane, it's almost over this phase.  38 days.

In the trunk, in the attic.

The fortune I got last night said rest was restorative for emotional and physical health.  I rolled my eyes a little and tossed it in the center of the table with the trash.  It was Laura's birthday and her fortune was perfect and auspcious for her new-coming year.   I focused on that instead.  Remember Gac, that slime stuff from the nineties?  That's how I felt Saturday morning.  Like sludge.  Sludge body, sludge brain cells, sludge muscles sludge blood, sludge Kelly totally conformed to the sheets and the bed.  There was no part, not one of me that was even capable of getting out of bed.

Whatever, out of bed I went and about two tables in at the big hotel by the sea the poetry light came on, so like every other genius-waitress ever there was I scooted in to an obscure corner and on my carbon-copy order pad stashed notes and poems all over the page.

This is killing me, I told my mother, the long hours and having again and again to subvert the impulse to write.  I texted Sean last week, in a moment of terrified frenzy, and begged him:  please can I just come straight there to Tennessee when I get on the road and hole up in a room while you and Jamie work during the day--and I will work, too?  I will write, I will write oh god, for days straight:  I will write.

My brother is amazing of course he didn't blink and all I can think is, days with the words and nights with them and their pregnancy.  How much luckier could I get?  Tyler came over yesterday in exchange for beer and pancakes.  He moved all the heavy shit down from the attic: this was what got shoved in the hot dark and dusty corners up there when Brandon and I split up Anngar farm, the bauble trinket stuff and some furniture and keepsakes I didn't have the heart to let go of back then.   80% of it is now boxed and ready for the girls from work to go through before the final trip to Goodwill and the local thrift stores.  There is nothing quite like knowing all your remaining belongings will fit in a 6x5 space.

I went through the trunk I got when I was 18 from the five and dime in Fells Point.  It holds mementos and scraps and I needed to make room.  I added a framed pic of Sam playing the banjo.  Wearing overalls and shirtless and of course no shoes, he was in the backyard at Truslow Road.  A flat black frame with three slots went in, one slot is Cades playing drums in the basement of WAC, one is Josh singing and one is Walsh on guitar, all from the same day.  Lots of little cards and quotes and pictures, too, from Chesapeake College and Katie and Beth and Paul and Kelly and others.  And a little dish I bought once in Seattle with Brandon, and a vase I bought in Delaware the last date I ever had with Josh.

In the trunk under some folders one flat box was tucked and fitted like a beach chair settled in the mud:  Inside the box on the top was Molly, pictures of her from that first trip Brandon and I ever took--to New England when I got sick after lunch on the coast in Mystic from bad clams and Katie's family took care of me, and then we drove all day to get to Molly's parent's hundred-year-old stone cabin on the sound in Ellsworth, Maine.  They fed us lobster out of the pot and pancakes cooked in a cast-iron griddle on top of the woodstove.  Molly took us to scavenge tide pools that afternoon, rowed us out in her little rowboat, taught us words like whorls and periwinkles and dog whelk.  There was a whole envelople of letters and songs Red Chevy Joe wrote me.   This stuff went in there years ago, before either of them was dead.  It didn't even pang my heart, Molly suffered so much and Joe's funeral was enough in November to remind me:  all things pass.  Kelly asked me late Saturday night if looking back on Chestertown was shocking, like seeing that whole other life lived that isn't me anymore did it make me stop in sudden question like woah, what happened?  It did, for a while.  But now, not really.  All versions and visions and incarnations change and re-change again.  It's all I know for sure.  Sure, like the notes from Mike Shue that were sad to see, notes from Geometry class when we were 15, there can sometimes be a pang.  Like it is now, literally right now: Jack Johnson on the radio singing my first ever Brandon-song, it beats a liquidy ache just a second but it is the twinge of life and thankfulness, the twinge of living:  I am living!  This is it!  The gentle acceptance of what is.

I have forgiven myself.  I didn't even consciously know it was something I needed to do, until the ushering moment that it happened.  It was a slow usher, nothing ecstatic.  Just an outbreath, a slight shifting, a barely there shaft of light where there wasn't darkness before but just a nothingness, an absence. 

Now it's peace, and readiness.  And looking forward--to the words, nothing else to be but poet-me and gypsy wild woman me, and nothing to do but write and love, and rest!