For Kelly J and Beth

Here is a poem I wrote last night in the margin of Women Who Run With the Wolves:

I meet her: La Llorona, she says
I am ruined.

There is shadow
of death mask
of blood &
dirt
on her face.

I tell her
Come close,
close to me.
I listen to what she tells me.

In this way
she knows:
she has been saved.

*    *    *
It is hard to keep doing what we do, I think to myself.  There are roots to roast, clothes to put away, an attic to be cleaned out or at least climbed in to--to make room for storage--cushions to be brought in off the porch and at least four calls to return since yesterday.  There is being nice to one another, and noticing the weather.  This is without school, without the reality of a lover that I yearn to cradle--of course I never let reality stop me--without children or a husband, without even a regular job.  This is without even contemplating time to write.  Still it goes, our funny programmed ways of continuing: falling from bed to floor in expectation of repetitive shelter and food.  Once we get to the other side of ourselves, have confronted all it is we have to own the love and the fear we then have the choice, and it looks like La Loba, La Mariposa, Skeleton Woman, La Inocente, She With Seal Skin...All the stories our mothers or their mothers ever told, great ancestress, great lovers of children, of men, of each other, great tender warriors and wipers of tears.  Kel, what we talked about yesterday on the phone, Beth what we talked about days before.  I say Clarrisa Pinkola said it best and she said it in her book last night to me, before bed. 

...it is standing still long enough to let the spirit find you.  It is said that all that you are seeking is also seeking you, that if you lay still, sit still, it will find you.  It has been waiting for you a long time.  Once it is here, dont move away.  Rest.  See what happens next.

Ahhh, beautiful.  Amen Amen.

I, Miscreant. List: love.

I hit the karmic reset button, gave total permission to myself to let go of every single idea I had about my life.

Moving to Baltimore, my novel, staying on the east coast. Savior syndrome and retreats and poetic love. Family, friends, tribal associations and unifications. How I even say my name.

In all that, I grew a total and almost complete aversion to all things electronic, save pictures. I have emails, weeks old, still unread. Facebook's become a foreign land.

Then I got on here, this morning, and thought of Bona Drag. And Erika, and my blog. The little wonders of truth that come with Love.

REASONS I LOVE TO BLOG
1. duh, because of spontaneous download~holy wonder alchemical power of submission to the impulse, itself
2. My writing partner, over at Muse. She has continued her work without me knowing well I was in the forest a while. "For your travels, on the road, and to bring you home. My writing pal." For how much I am looking forward to resuming our work together, now that I've touched down.
3. Bona Drag. Just go there and slurp a while on her delicious aesthetic.
4. Carrot. Over at I AM NOT AFRAID OF WINTER. We ran out of gas together.
5. Davka. At davka: deer girl medicine. Who also hit a reset button, which I knew she was doing before she even posted about it.
6. Kelly Johnson. Over at Manbait. Her post Home Food from Sunday June 6. About place.

I haven't sat and blogrolled in a month. But this morning the poetry was a slow wave breaking, right at the moment the white crashes over the peak and the clear upwell becomes topside and the water behind it is perfectly clear and see through, and makes everything above surface shine with prism light. And above the surface was the spectacle of color these voices are to me, so bright.

Read them.

Man Bait

I so, so luckin fove this grl. She is gorgeous, talented, and full of fire and love, which she is now generating in to absoloutely excellent yummmmmmmmmmmmmms. I know, her solstice present to me this past december was a batch full of baked goods, which kept me full all those quiet creepy first nites at Chop....Rubbin her tum...............Read all about it: Man Bait and grow to love her as much as i do

Waxing Poetic Will Never Kill Me Enough

I seem to find the taste of this air
sour, the face of this plain
as his eyes
quick-changing as the wind

The tide moves in the same direction
home, flagging
and backwards it
never wins

Just keeps on going
on. I must practice caution

if poetry's come back to me
to be my friend.

~~
Good god isn't this always the way? These words they flow like rubble--I mean that, too--like little freakin pebbles out of me sometimes and it is such a struggle to just allow them the motion of letting go. Because--why? Because it hurts if, when, it ends? Like above. I'm walking out of the damn house on Friday to go the beach and they just start coming. I was fighting them, for sure, I knew once they started off I'd go and who knows where I'd get to or just when I'd be back. I've been fighting them a lot. I jotted down just enough, just what's above, got out just enough to let the surge pass so I could get out the door. Got those little bitches of words out like you might, I dont know, force up a long SoCo drenched Saturday night. Retchingly with sore ass knees. If you will...

Ugh I'm having such a bastard of a time committing to me. This is it, I guess, my last little stretch, my last little dusty basement catnap before I step out in to the sun. What I mean--well, here, Jung said it about people like me: "Perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, that perhaps alcoholism is a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition." Yes it's called ravage. Ravage hunger for life and rapture. Fucking poetry. You bitch-slap me every time.

Perhaps I am being vague. Apologies dear reader as you climb this my mental Jenga topple along with me in my head. (Metaphor tribute to Sarah over at Moleskin Dreams, thanks thanks thank you) What I am thinking about is this--as Jung saw it alcholism, addiction, is a sacred disease. We compelled by its claws either thirst too greatly for life and love and all its bawdy passion and beautiful hard parts and thus drink to settle this ache, or else drink to create it. Either way what a taileating snake are we. But Jung's greater, deeper implication of the disease is the aspect of recovery--finding deep within the wreckage of one's own mass calamity the very seeds with which to regrow. It is the case of he who knows the dark is who shall most value the light. And true true true to form this is my great medicine of Crow--the Value of Truth, or, to paraphrase Herman Hesse, how Everything is true including the Lie. The funny little dichotomy of tiptoe-ing or even outright booty dancing a while with fear, anger, laziness, obsession, dishonesty whatever....that the triumph over these parts is not just a full gaping swallow of the flaws of humanness, but at once the transcendent power deep within the human to overcome herself and her blocks through acceptance of herself and her blocks, when finally she stops fighting herself and sees it she herself causing all the pain. Ahhhh, that we might all bask in this eternal conflicting growth circle of beautiful fucking misery-laden joy...
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Which brings me to poetry. How I live and die I swear to you at the end of the day it is sometimes the only thing that sees me through. And I think that this has everything to do with the actual ethics of poetry, which to me is a very real and personal thing. Ethics meaning the principle of it. Poetry to me is not just words on a page or even mystical deepwetfeelingurges that partly cause me to almost scream. Poetry is a lifestyle choice, a calling, a certain commitment to attitude of reverie and awe, a commitment to taking it all in with a big painful swallow, a commitment or a way to approach life. It is a belief, the truest one, in magic. It is the Art of self-creation. It is the Art of self-deception. It is, at the end of the day, the Art of Self, and Living.

So my last challenge, whenever I get this way wound-up--cuz oh, believe me, I been here before--is reckoning poetry with, to put it contextually, what I know of Jung. The ability, finally, to surrender to the final unknown. To say, okay the cord I am bent all the way around is actually the cord of me, and I need now to let go. I need, ahhhhh okay I'll say it, to let go of this control, or at least this illusion of being in control...

The final final softening that comes in a great gasp when I come down off myself and ask for help. The giving up. At my wits end and my final door, the final Demon guarding the gate is poetry, she just wont let me through. And how long will this dance go on, seeing as how I know it is she who will turn in to my Angel, too?

She's so glamorous with her whistles and her ribbons and her bows.

Ahhh, sacred hunger.

I hate this part....I always forget right here, this last step to the threshold, who I am and what I'm all about. Oh oh oh... "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." (Aldous Huxley) But you can't change by trying to force change. Ahhhhhhhhhh oh god I'm just about there, I swear I can feel it is this me beginning or just getting ready to almost begin....??

Anyhow. This post was inspired by a marvelous freakin piece over at The Curiosity Shop that had me up with wheels rolling last night. The writing is so fine, but the intelligence is clearly a craft in its self. If you're anything like me you might get why Kelly's post prompted this somewhat random response. And I swear I'm not propping her cuz she shouts me out. Or at least that's not the only reason why....
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What I'm listening to: DeVotchka. These freaks are my freakin fave.