Things

Things that relax me:
~the fireplace at Panera, the way the heat feels like a warm gold ball rolling over me like in gym class when we were real young and gave each other massages with the red rubber dodge balls
~jazz, especially Miles and Coletrain; and Old-time, like Count Basie and Billie
~taking a long soak in my own hot bath
~the luxury of a whole hour of morning quiet time now that I am only minutes from work
~hot, homemade soup
~the warm feeling of anticipation that comes from thinking about toasty winter nights with close friends
~the quiet angles of my living room, how simple and appealing, and quiet and right it is
~laughing. a lot. til the muscles of my gut are all crunched up and I have smile wrinkles deep in my face. ("Stardust? Is that you?" "Yes, fair maiden. Lo, I have come from beyond to spread the goodliness of sissyhood...")

Things I forgot about:
~how quickly the grey seeps in to me, the real and dulling effect of how the sudden shrink time of sunlight impacts me
~my certainty of how closely we All are affected by that. I had over half my new students cancel or reschedule on me today. It was so grey today that the color actually seemed to hang on the air like rainforest mist or desert dust.
~what writing does for me. AND HOW HARD it is to force myself in to writing without stopping after I've gone ahead and stopped for a while

Things I'm so grateful for:
~my writing partner, who is all about NaNoWriMo and watching her forge forward and break through her own defenses has made me both so inspired and, at once, given rise to that friendly ol marauder Competition, thereby forcing me to get on my damn game. Which makes me just sooo, soo freakin thankful for Erika and so in awe of how life, after 20 years, circled us back around to each other again. Really, when I get quaked with this much warmth of emotion, I have no words.
~my little apartment. Have I mentioned this lately?
~the unforeseen
~my friends and family. It is November, I am soon to be 9 years clean and sober and the time of month to count thanks is almost here. Amen Amen Amen, there is just so much....

"You think you can't write....

...but the truth is, you can't tell. the problem is, no one likes a snitch." ~betsy lerner

so, i'm writing a book.

it's fun, and also very weird. i've written two other ones, both were for college and back then in the face of institution the facts were that i never really gave a fluck. which means i've got in my catalouge one memoir from community college (responsible, simultaneous to a guy who used to drive a red chevy truck and broke my heart, for my very impulsive choice to go to washington college and Write--o love, o sacred music, o one who hears those bells and cries and cries and draws sweet meaning by and by.) that memoir was a virtual tell all of suburban funk and foolery in the eyes of a just barely finished teenager, one who by all definitions partied down and clearly was armed with the arrogance of honesty that a young one without knowledge intuitively calls upon. i had NO inhibitions and for the purpose it served me well. the second was fiction, was my thesis at wac, a novella written a year in to my sobriety and full with the demons and pain of addiction and most particularly the loss of my good friend and homie fannon to the lifestyle. my advisor back then just kept saying how it was very raw it was.

it was, those wounds were fresh and beaming as gold.

it's been seven years since then, almost eight if you count the fall that i first gave vision to my advisor of that fiction. lately i keep thinking about a quote i read by salinger, back when i used to teach in the jail. "there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other. you'll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you're keeping everyone happy, and you'll simply write what's real and true...one day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say to about you. that's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of."

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i've been locked-up, put-out, broke-up, raving-mad contemptously sad a wise crazee earth womyn lost a hella bunch angry as a wasp and at times sharp as hell. i've made and kept and also lost some phenomenal fucking friends. i've run around in circles where i've actually been known as "spiritual kel". i mean, cmon. when it finally comes down to telling the truth, the real truth is there's not a damn thing you can do to keep your soul from practically forcing it all the way out...

for a person like me in fact, it's the only way to make it through

my friend lara once wrote this excellent piece about how just a few moments of writing after a self-imposed dry spell and she can actually feel her muscles melt loose away from her bones. now, that's it, isn't it? that's fine, fine showing and that for me is just the way it is.

which DOESN'T make it easy, not at all. it just proves my point about how some of us, no matter what, are at the end of the day simply compelled by the Call. and should we refuse it, take no note of that inner longing or worse work to deny our most divine, most sacred hunger? well i know, this i know for certain: there is no misery more severe.

so. tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth.

i will flesh out my experiences now, or shall continue. shall flesh out the Me i hold most dear...

what i'm listening to now, cuz i woke up with it playing in my head:
dylan's ring them bells

O, coffee life....

thank life for you coffee cat, even tho when you changed from coffee east how i hated your name. thank life for you erika, and your practical approach to things. thank life for you date book: and the hour and half penciled in three times a week assuring i come here, sit down, and do just this....

thank life for you and all these young people, for rob and kj in seperate frames here on the walls. thank life for you funny aching beautiful minimal songs by huskyvoiced fellas and breathy womyns--i was a senior in college when i added to my agenda "barista" and worked a year at the local spot in chestertown, the one you learned to avoid if you had to get somewhere on time. because everyone there you know, and everyone you know is always there.

easton is bigger, the country surrounding her more spread out. (yes yes where ctown was a man, sweet easton is definitely a woman. i can hear it at night in the silence of her streets and how her trees and flowers sing. a chorus of sweet, while chestertown was always so flat, or thunderouosly barritone...o shamanmamaearthofmineheartandsoul, thank life for thank life....) and so while the poverty here is more spread out, and class in general more specifically profound, there is a far greater sense of lower middle class around here....o eastern shore, o employment office and family centers where i call my home, yes these too, thank life for you

why did i avoid it here so long? so much of my good times of the last 10 years have come out of coffee shops the late night dc ones after the clubs or meetins, all those all those 49 west nights, and o chestertown, where my moments came together for more than one love and now on to this one, center of a far larger town, all the people with smiles like they already know me, all the people who i'm sure really do already have me figured out...o writing life, o coffee shop opened til 10... with Rob and KJ on the walls how their local heroism delights and joys me and cracks me up, o faces here and the music i've never heard of but always always makes me groove....i am so gloriously glowing right now i dont know quite what to do....

what i'm listening to: gwendolyn

"Our lives are at once

...ordinary and mythical. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand."

Thus here i meet myself again at this well of me, hypersensitive to this life of me, to the living of me, the daily runnings of in and out, the overflowing, how scary to confront this me all alone, literally, in the dark...how self-centered i am!! we all are! only that the artist knows enough to tell on herself, or else to pretend with one eye shut that it's not true but only claim as much for the funny peep-hole belief, the lie we tell ourselves! that beneath the guise it's for the good of all things, ahhh and so arrogantly call it our Work. and me with the dastardly fights and excuses near the end, aaah pity for, pity of self-obsessed infinitely transmuting me. blessed self-obsession verses self-relief. o world, i dub thee Gold and Bought and Boundless, precious excess of unexamined extreme

Erika Robuck

Okay, so check out my friend Erika Robuck’s site. She is a self-published author recently picked up by a national firm and also it just so happens that I went from little school on up with her, which makes us special to the other in my opinion because we hold the bones of one another’s long history of writing. (She never ceases to remind me of my play Never Tear Us Apart in the 7th grade and I her of the historical fiction she’d hand me under the desk, in her neat blue cursive all roundy curls and fat a’s on shaggy lined loose leaf, in Ms. Fouse’s Language Arts class.)

First, her novel Receive Me Falling on Amazon. This is historical fiction and worthy of a summer read for the strength of her protagonist Catherine, a plantation and slave owner on the Caribbean Isle of Nevis during the sugarcane industry of the 1800’s. A fine crafting of tale unfolds on this island, with the subtleties of Catherine's moral dilemmas at perfect play against the slow building climax of the mystery which brings us to the Island in the first place. Truly, there were sections of this book when I found myself unable to put it down, or else skipping ahead to find out what would happen next.

(Usually this is when I gush about how super proud I am of her….)

So, first thing I want you to do dear reader, jump here and purchase her book (then go review her on Amazon to boost her ratings.) Then go here, and put Erika’s blog in your favorites, because if you are a bookie then you must trust me: I have watched her blog evolve in to a reliable source for good reads. And homegrl devours books the way I get down on, oh I don’t know say sunshine or Mexican food or live music playing outside. Like she can’t get enough and is always posting about her latest read. Fine, intelligent posts that make me want to be in a class she teaches or some such thing...

Which brings us to the part where I gush over my excitement that she is also my new writing buddy, which means not only am I embarking on a new creative venture, but I have someone infinitely inspiring to be doing so with, as well. Which is partly why I haven't been around much lately.

And that’s what I have to say about that.

Friday Reflections: Truslow Road

There were these tall pines that lined the back end of the land at Truslow. Tall, and with the sweet achy smell of the needles that make you remember a kind of inner quiet you never actually knew but secretly hope for in the woods. Tall pines, like the kind that at night blend in with sky so you are sure they are having a conversation up there in the dark with the clouds that are joking with them with their tender little caresses moving as fast as they do across the sky. Slow down slow down maybe the tall pines are saying to the night clouds, slow down and stay a while here in the dark with our sweet sweet smell.

It was November, the end, when we moved in there, to that 600-square-foot falling down asbestos run deadgreen shingled shack on Truslow Road, back of Truslow Creek edge of Kingstown, Queen Anne's County side of the Chester. A town as I always find them, without a zip code. We furnished that house with third and fourth-hand finds we bought at the local auction for $10, $7, maybe $6 the whole Lot. Once, that $7 bought me a brown banana seat bike from the seventies, a red paint-splattered stool, two brown wood foot stools, a pair of work boots and two quarts of oil. Every Wednesday for months we'd go to auction to see what we could see, neither of us having jobs or any belongings but campgear to speak of, having just ended our travelling days of living on the road. It was an auspicious return home, Full Moon night of Final Harvest, October 2005. Moon so big and pink and white it stuck us where our breath should be as it hung over watching Washington DC. We rolled in from the Mountains charging along Rt. 50 New York Avenue beside the Mall and I secretly sucked in when we got to the city and I felt the energy of the land all around of where I'm from and then, I saw the moon at once too and felt the longing inside give out Home....

Truslow wasn't planned, as so much of the big moves in my life rarely are. One day we just got sick of living with his mom. Ex-stepdad had this shitty little pad going down in the dirt and did we want to upkeep it, fix it up even, and care for the land? The land. It was November so that the land when we moved in was just one big patch of curled brown grass, but a whole-acre full, and with the tall tall trees in the back that never lose their leaves. And it had this dead-zone that vibrated to me: this huge matted mess of vines with prickers and thicket and undergrowth where some time ago some nice hedges or bushes must've been. That's where we will make this home I knew.

And we did: by February first seed we'd set about taking out that thicket just sort of stuck there in the back acre of our land. It covered a good 4 or 5 hundred square feet, almost as big as our house itself, and we worked at it, hard, sweaty in the cold February air but under the early that year sun. I wore work gloves and got tears and lines of red blood anywhere I had exposed skin and at the end of those days I felt for the first time what it feels like to cultivate something with your entire body, something sacred and precious as the eternal land. It was his idea to actually recess the fire pit we were putting in, so that the fire would actually warm from the underside of the ground. And by light/dark time of Equinox that year we had made our mark and called others in to join our Home: a community gathering advertised locally to all to join us for soul warming and music in celebration of grass-roots place-building and being true to as within, so without. I burnt a thick dried twig of sage and set a sacred circle around that fire pit as we completed it, walking three times with the smoke and the song on my breath and my heart open in love and thanksgiving--my friend Turtle Mike was there to help set up with the lights and he followed me round and round and round. It was the first night I ever met Walsh and heard her sing and of course this happened through Josh, and both of them played and stilled our hearts and many people, caught fully by the vibe we meant to capture and release in goodwill that night, had tears of gratefullness rolling down their cheeks. At the very end it rained a light light rain and this was the sign of release and blessing, and at once cleansing, which I was waiting for as omen of great harmony and success.

It was March the following year that those tall pines and that space created in honor and awe and thanksgiving at their feet called out to me again so loudly. Spring herself came quieter that year, waiting to show little peeks of her face til well after first-seed, unlike February the year before. I had been through a long winter. A new position in Adult Ed under a threatening and domineering new boss was challenging me in ways I never before knew. I gave all my energy to it, the job, because I cared about the people and so if there are people involved that is what I always do. But I was dwindling away and miserable inside. In long hours of prayer and mediation I sought to follow the heart of, to transmute with the change, that I knew on my deepest level was attempting to begin. I hated it, though knew begrudgingly that time is time and the process must run its course. And so, in those weeks of March leading to Equinox and New Year for me, I felt called out by the land, by the deep healing energy of Home.

I carried arm loads of books: notebooks and poetry, and a Christian text by Oswald Chambers I was deeply in to, out to the land moist in her pre-spring roots. And sometimes I would read, and if the words started to come I would write and write, but mostly I just laid there, on the ground. With my body feeling the waking of the land. Recognizing a fine softening between my contour and its. And I would breathe, and it was like the first time I ever knew about and tasted air. I still remember quite physically what it was like to take those long healing breaths like that, like, in fact, I was breathing in the whole of that land, of those trees, of all that pulsing of music and light by fire that still I am sure lives right now back there, back of Truslow in the roots of the one time heart of our land.

Yesterday I came home from work and the sun was high enough in the sky to still get to soak in some strong white rays. I ran in to Teena's house, got some books and notebooks, and ran out with my arms full dragging a beach chair awkwardly behind. I didn't read at all, just sat in that deep breathing place of half-eyed slumber.

That last March at Truslow it was as if a great rest had come upon me. And inside that sleep there lived the quiet seedlings of personal truth I wasn't capable yet, and so therefor unready, to be. Indeed, in the time that followed those several weeks it turned out I would need all the energy that I stored during my great and blessed pause with the tall pine trees: by the end of that month we learned that we had to move, and so the adventure continued, and the deep seeds began to unfurl, as we made our way on to Anngar Farm.

Recently my friend Susan told me one of her favorite sayings is But the hallway's hell! As in when we are waiting for the promised window to open after our most recent door has shut, waiting in the hallway sure can suck. But I don't know. Maybe the hallway can be the best part. Maybe it's like the deep reserve of air we never knew we had.

On Tribe, and Remembering

So my cousin Erin posted this really great piece last night over at Infinite and Endless. She is a dream. Here is a story:

It was end of June and I was eight-years-old an age still young enough to not really know time. Therefor June equaled one thing and that was Summertime which equaled one thing and that was Infinity. Long days of playing with the neighborhood kids and the hot melty tar of the driveway burning our feet.

Or, the beach. The beach the beach the beach, hot sand on my tender feet and the cold at night in my parents room under the window air-unit that made my sunburned aloe-face feel so smooth and cool. Satiation: when all is right with the world. How salt and sand for me have so much to do with this. We lived in the summer in a house crowded on the floors at night by the blow-up mattresses of all my aunts and uncles. My Pop, "The Colonel", was still alive then and these were the very ends of days that I did not know then were instructing me. Filling my life with my own inner quest for understanding of who I am. And how, for some very few of us, when we live the definition of something ambiguous as identity the knowledge of the details of this at once fulfill us, and challenge us. It's like the more I gain awareness of my outline the more I consistently find that the very next step, for a person like me, is to expand it. So I'm 8, it's summertime 1985. My grandparent's house at the shore is overloaded with family and we are loud, throat-pitched people and game-players and story-tellers every one. The nights are full with poker and smoke and though I am close at 8 to too old I still want to sit on dad or Uncle Kevin's lap if I'm allowed when it's late enough that they talk that funny low sidetalk out of their mouths and I get to laugh like I get it with my eyes on the ice melting in their glasses. In the daytime I have Barbies which I'm also near grown out of by now and also this glorious little baby cousin Esther she is fatcheeked and nubby with a scrunchy diaper and laughs when I retrieve her pacifier for her only to throw it across the room again and again. And also, there is electric in the air that reminds me of ice cream: the babies. The babies are coming, the babies are here.

Esther was first, in September, which made her near a year that June. And then Jackie, oh Jackie. My Grandmother's high-pitch panic sound when they brought her through the front door of the beach house in the car-seat Uncle Bill carried with both hands. That beam of his, definitive deliciousness of a face light-up specific to Uncle Bill: the light and flash around his broad teeth and Irish eyes. It was a surprise to Gram that they were even coming with the new baby so young, and like everything new Grammy took it loud and wrong at first. When I looked to the adults to understand what was wrong: in a hush from woman to woman, the secret. Jackie's only two weeks old. As if this should have explained everything. To this day this is the way of the McMullen. The unspoken drama that enwrapped certain things, the look in an eye over glasses or the intone of the fold of the words. The subtle emotional infliction that went with the late nights, the crowded kitchen mornings full of food, natural as all other parts of who we were: the seriousness of Life, edged as it could be with tragedy. That whole old-world post-immigrant thing, protective of the what-could-come and the unseen. That pigshit way some of us have that rebelled in the face of such unspokens. Existent today only in sighs or flickers in the eye, or if you're like me in a flash that reads Challenge.

So Esther and Jackie have arrived, not just to the Pop and Gram's beachhouse at The Pines but to the world! And too, the excitement of the Mary's: Uncle Tim's wife, pregnant-out-to-there, so you could see her belly-button buckled out from all the pressure through her shirt. In the kitchen, on the cool linoleum Tim's Mary stood back of Uncle Paul's Mary, redhead of curls down the shoulders of Paul's Mary and those big oversized rose glasses and that smoky husk of her laugh there even then. The power of her, that energy that used to surround her--and Katie, the baby inside who would come in October, already outsized like her mom.

It was barely a week or so later that Tim's Mary went. We were home now, respectively: all the Aunts and Uncles and kids tucked away in their plastic-sided houses in their burgeoning suburbs splayed out this way and that from Grammy and Pop's South Baltimore--Church Street--home. Making it. It was July, the first week, and hot so that my legs stuck to the grey leather of dad's caddie in the little bit of time it took to open the backseat door and get my seatbelt clicked. We were on our way to Tim and Mary's house ShadyHillLane. I remember even then the magic that surrounded the very words of that place. Maybe it was the pine trees that put a softened haze over the bricks of their house and muted out the rest of the world. Whatever it was,whatever it is, their house still has a magic effect on me, one of peace, to this day. And here is what I remember, walking in and the muffled sound of adult and adult talk, then dad saying to me you can't go up right now sis you're Aunt Mary's breastfeeding. And then the softness that for Uncle Tim has always passed as his way, uncharacteristic, of pride. No, it's ok, Kel can go up.

And walking in, and seeing Erin being drawn away from Aunt Mary's swollen chest, the baby so tiny and wrapped she was barely there, and then her being offered out into the air to me. Their big high bed so tall to me then, the nights and nights of giggles and laughter my brother and I had shared with Tim and Mary tucked in those sheets. How it all seemed so different in that moment as they settled me in against the pillows: the curtains pulled so that the room was with a subtle roseyellow glow. The warmth, the pure delicate coziness of the those sheets and that bed. Getting pulled in to that, encirlced by that wonder, that fine gentle bliss of moment to moment allure: awareness of fragility, ohh, of Life and tender birth. And holding her, my little cousin, for the first time. I was eight years old, wispy blond often red-faced bossy but so easy to be embarrassed and extra sensitive, and also a wee thing, bony and small. And the baby, Erin a little-bit of a thing, so small, so small! The perfect size for me, she melded right in to my arms and against my heart and close in to my chest. This was, for the first time, what it was to be inside of something so very big that even then I realized bigness has to do with being small.

Anyway, Erin, if you don't mind a public post rather than a comment in response to your blog: I feel you, sister. This call towards Life, this inherent sense that we should be enlarging the nest. And at once this conflicting perplexed sense, uncatagorized, a nameless feeling of unquenched calling. So potent it's as if it's of our blood. Yes, how it strangely seems to come from that very same nest. So it goes my sister, my friend. So it goes!!

Amen amen amen.

Me and some of the cuz's, Nov 08, or as cuz Pat calls us: The McMafia

Brandon

In the fall of 2002 this was what my life looked like. I was 25 and about to be two years sober. It was mid-October. I was four months a college grad, my mom was in the process of selling the house I grew up in from 12 on and my dad had just quit his corporate-American lifestyle, sold his condo in Ruston "Sillicon Valley of the East" Virginia and moved back to the beach, prompted all at once by the slow, then final loss of one of two of his best friends to cancer. Dad stood by, and took care of his friend Richard who he'd known from Brooklyn, Bmore, since they were in their twenties, every day those last months until August when they said goodbye. Richard died right about the time that it became clear that Chuck, Dad and Rich's other best friend from that same early-twenties hellion-time, was also going to die. Cancer took to him with a vengeance, too. A week after Richard died my dad completely left his own life. He went to the beach so he could, for a while, hide. And heal.

It was the most courageous thing I'd ever seen him do.

I mention this because I was there, at the beach, for part of that time. I was confused, caught in that horrible juxtaposition of blindness: complete inexperience at adulthood coupled with vague awareness of my glorious, terrifying Independence. It was far too real, and raw and wide-open, to really see! It took me 7 years to get through college and during that time I think my total monthly bills were, maybe, $400. Maybe. Suddenly I was a college grad, with a writing fricken degree?? Paying rent to a lovely girl in Chestertown for a room in her sweet Victorian house, and my student loans no longer covered my monthly needs. In fact, in addition to rent I now had to start to pay back my student loans! So I was barista-ing at the local coffee shop, waitering in a tux-button down at the local white linen, and the other three days a week I pulled double-shifts at a high-volume seafood joint on the Northern-most edge of Ocean City. And I watched my dad, during that time, emotionally fall down.

It sucked. For all of us, my mom selling our home, my lost and desolate dad who up til then had physically been absent for most of my "adult" life, and my brother Sean, who also had just graduated and who also was living at the beach waitering at the same seafood joint(which, during a lot of those day-shifts during that slow and sunny September meant keeping his eye on the fishing rod propped off the back deck of the restaurant and in to the Bay), it sucked. I think we were all in that place that us humans hate to be in: the in-between place. Or better, how I like to call it: Through. As in the only way out....

So yeah, I was working weekend days at the coffee shop, weekend nights at the Hotel in my button-down, and then driving to the beach to stay with dad, immobile on the couch, and go pull doubles in town. I had very little sense of what I wanted my future to be like. I knew one thing for sure, had decided it, just as sure as if I decided to drive to the post office or to make my bed, I was going to be a writer. I was on my bed in the lovely girl in Chestertown's Victorian home, the bed had high cold metal posts that were meant to look brass but the paint was thin and instead they were chipped white so they just looked old and even black in some places too, and I had scarves tied around them and blankets over the ornate curled cold metal at the foot and the head. And I was on the bed and I was writing in a journal and it was this very week six years ago because I was writing about my baby Amy who was just about to turn, back then, one-sober-year-old. (Happy 7 years Amy!) And the writing about/to her became very poetic and the candles and the incense that had prompted the boyfriend of the lovely girl in Chestertown in whose home I was living to think I was a witch were burning with the warm orange light and the warm orange smells and I all of a sudden, just like that, understood deep and real: I am going to be a writer. And I understood: this means nothing, nothing at all other than the commitment, unabashed and unafraid, to follow the inner impulse. To follow it, whenever, and to wherever, it meant to take me.

Oh, I was sad. I was sad, for my dad, my mom and her empty-nest, for my life that had no semblance or order to it, for my old life of partying that no more offered solace or an answer. The friends I had lost to all that. I was confused, disoriented, working like a dog, and, like I said, I was pretty damn sad. But mostly, cuz it was the best I could do, I was numb to all that sadness. And so I began to write. To write my way through....

And then not a week later, in he came. This young guy with these big, I mean big brown eyes. With these lashes that reminded me of honey. And this river, this river that he did to my heart.

Brandon worked at the coffee shop with me and I always used to flirt with him. Tell him if only he were old enough, how I'd rock his world. He was 20. A baby to me then! And so, so cute.

The lovely girl with the Victorian house also worked with me, she set us up after getting tired of seeing us swoon. She invited him over, made us dinner, her boyfriend built a fire, rented us a movie, and then together they quietly and with sneaky smiles and smarmy charm left us alone for the rest of the night...After that first night it felt like a linebacker socked in to my heart: I never knew it could open, and take flight, like that before. It's like I never even knew that love existed. And then, after just one moment, I suddenly did.

It is six years since, this week. We are, so to speak, going "through" some things right now. I know how now, I've learned better how to do it, the making your way through thing. But it's hard, it's not easy, it plain sucks. Especially cuz I still so love those precious honey eyes.

Because I Feel Like It

yes yes yes, a weekend all to me, starting despairingly bc i dear reader am always no-thing if not dramatically self-involved in the happenings or so perceived non-happenings of my very own life...and do tend to let such perceptions overcome the best of me...

so said, what a glory day i've had since yesterday passed and i subsequently got my head out of my ass. handscrubbed my versa this afternoon after a trip to the library--where my card was so outdated i had to open a new account in order to check out Girls Like Us Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation which called to me literally off of the shelf as i passed it by. i hoped, as i heaped said work and a slathering poetry books on the counter, that it would deliver me in a similar mythically-steeped retrieval of trailblazer femin-ista historia as diPrima's bio My Life as a Woman The New York Years did. and so far i am adequately quenched.

made some jewelry today, too. and wrote a poem. tonite, it's my plan, after the moon goes up and the light is all over the land the way only darktime light can be, i am going to write. like, maybe even all nite long....

May Day

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,
Whatever may have happened

Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,
Be a cell where a struggling tendril

Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever
Touched a hair on my head, because

It doesn't matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.
I've decided to walk a long way

Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,
Let it go as it will to the place

It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.

Phillis Levin

My tribe, my art, my madness, my home

They say write your madness. Or specifically, your obsessions. Cuz that's what makes you a liver of this life, a qualified human being with your own unique something to say. It's true. Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones (read this book) tells us it's okay about our obsessions. Actually she goes as far as to say make a list of them, because when you get down to writing and having to be there, alone with yourself on the page, one of two things is going to happen. You'll either tunnel in and extol on and on all about those couple of things that whirl away most of your brain activity from day to day and at the very least be self-informed when you're done, or else your going to try to avoid them, and in doing so, either not write at all or else end up ONLY, with sort of neurotic blinders on, writing about the one thing that in every other waking moment of your life you spend so much time trying not to look at.

I am mad about my family--my tribe and friends and the people I seem to have come here with. Their karmic patterning and how they are reflected in me and we are all rooted up in each other. Knowing this, really getting in to the stink and the light of it, helps me better decode who we each are trying to be. I'm mad about my art, the self-expression of my madness, and of anything that prompts that or helps me digest it or want to pump it out of me. I am mad about my madness: my spiritual growth or anyhow the experiences of this here soul. Sometimes I am mad about people, certain people, but I chunk them in with the tribe thing. I am mad, I get mad, about this idea of one single word, about the digressions and assertions and the alertness and sensitivity and the conflicts of mine and everyone else's ideas about this one word God. I am mad about Home, and place. And Youth. Music. Soul. Nature. But these all come back to the same couple things, in no particular order--my tribe, my art, my madness, my home.

I want to go back and write about a couple of momentous experiences from this summer but I am also not sure where this will take me, and so it may take a couple days/a couple posts. Firstly, Artscape. The nation's biggest free public art festival--on the streets of Baldamore every year in July. Mom claims we went there to the festival alot as kids, up to the top of MLK in the heart of the city a block away from the hospital where she worked and sometimes got to go sit in the nurse's lounge and play. I do have a mass of memories from childhood labeled city. The physical fragments I recall are of half-way up stuff and commotion: from the knees-up of people in Lexington Market or the other one on Cross Street, the door-up of tall tall buildings in the commerce section where dad worked, the tires-up of fast moving cars on the grey corners and the light coming down the eyelevel alleys from the way-up sky. And the way the bay at the Harbour made you aware of all that sky. The towering sense of life all about you in little splotches of movie-slide detail: how the city brings all that life in a magnified way right on top of you as a kid and you can feel it pulsing there, wizzing on top of you and moving all around you and passing you ever so quickly by and how all that power, all those dizzy half-up visual moments are compounded in to the couple of memories the soft grey flesh of your brain was willing to stop and say hey, I'll take this one down. Mostly my memories are visceral: the cool feeling of the water that spritzed me and my three-year-old boyfriend Kurt when we walked under the misters at the Harbour after the Science Center or the Constellation or the Aquarium and my socks and my shoes got wet. The heat on my ankles that rose up off the street tar. The sweet smell at the Greek festivals that I will forever associate with sticky fingers and bahklava. Being a kid, being so close to real life there on the ground. And the music, the music brushing my ears and the magical feeling of grass in the middle of all that concrete, the music literally moving by my head on the air, through my hair and me with the grass and the late twilight heat of July and mom's artist friend Ellie: being a kid and the touching throb of life that is art and how as kids all that art which is life is still so natural a rhythm to us. Tired after a long day in the sun with all the half-up views at the festival that made mom's eyes twinkle in wonder and her breath go breezy: Artscape.


Sean my brother said it ain't Artscape if it ain't a hundred plus fucking degrees. Yep, that's to be an adult at Artscape. We drove up from Chestertown and got there on Sunday, the last day of the festival, around 11 in the morning. We were laughing and rolling our eyes with tender family humor and had made decisions to go with the day because my mom and her family, her sister and brother-in-law and three of their kids were all coming up from the beach, too, and my mom's family likes to claim to plan things but really it's an excuse for them all to complain a little and at once laugh at each other I mean really laugh until tears come and then in private each one say something mildly injured but also always very funny. And the plans never ever go according to schedule and mostly just get lost or forgot and that is mom's family, and why I love them, how human they are, how imperfectly annoying but able to laugh so frolickingly hard at each other cuz at least they sort of partly see the imperfections and the laughter reminds us we all have that in common. But before I remembered that I just got alot of phone calls from mom and Sean, who was going to the festival to meet us with his new girl from his home in Columbia, about trying to plan and to meet and if there is one thing I cant stand it's going to a wide open place of Life and trying to manage or create the experience. So Bran and I did what we do best. We agreed to quiet. We started the day in the front lawn of our farm, corn rows all growing high above the street and us in the sun Thanking the Day for the Harmony it was meant to bring. With our arms up wide above our heads our hearts open pointed at the sky. Then we got in the car, drove an hour and fifteen minutes cuz I only know how to drive fast, to Lombard Street found free parking and had the best day we could have never planned...

The Wailers were scheduled to headline as the final wrap-up act and that was at 6. First we walked Mt. Royal on the right side and I relished in every single vendor stand that I came across. Right away I saw something that I wanted to buy. This guy doing little sculptures made from rail ties. The were small like the size of a fat grey Barbie doll and on a little steel stand. And they were so alive--enchanted! I loved them. They had little placards that said things like "The Morning After" with a railroad tie-made man perched over a railroad tie-made toilet. Or "Chiropractor" with a railroad tie patient getting his leg yanked above his head by a railroad tie doctor. They were so gloriously irreverent it was like they were smiling wryly at you and winking their non-existent railroad tie eyes. I wanted the waitress one. Immediately, art came alive and life spoke to me: the sacred mundane, ahhhhhhhh.

By the time we got to the top of Mt. Royal where the local music stage was we were hungry and wanted a snack. Best part of Artscape besides the free music and the street performers and MICA being open and the Symphony Opera House being open and Lyric being open for free shows all day and the many many vendors and the children's theater's and the hands-on displays is all of the all of the all of the very good food. This year they had a green/organic food court too but we never even made it there. Instead we split a big serving of chicken curry sitting on the curb listening to a funk/punk fusion local band. And when we were done we got up to walk down the other side of Mt. Royal and see those vendors when what do you know there was mom, Aunt Lori and cousin Mason and he was jamming with this short wiry dreadlocked black guy like they knew each other forever calling each other things like chief and smiling and sweating. We chilled with the fam awhile. Then here comes Sean and his girl, and of course we all found each other by happenstance there in the middle of the festival come together under the hot sun.
This is a card from a pack that the non-profit Art with a Heart gave to me after buying a craft from them. The image was done by a woman who lives in a shelter for homeless women and their children. Art with a Heart basically does programming throughout the city, empowering folks by giving them tools and permission for self-expression through all kinds of different art forms. Half the profits of what they sold at Artscape that day went to the artist, the other half back to the organization to keep it going. HOW EXACTLY IT IS THAT? A real live art co-op functioning in the midst of some of the most hopeless accounts that life can deal. I bought a decoupaged mirror from a fat-faced boy who shyly showed me his work and beamed when my heart jumped because the colors he used for his mirror are the vital colors of me in my joy essence. I bought it spot on out of sheer joy essence though whether it came from his beam or my love of the colors I am not sure. Support these people and this group.

The other thing I bought was a print by James Mayfield, out of New York, called Woman Grounded In Thought. His site is under construction right now, but when it is up if there is a link to this piece check it out. I love how this gals whole body has been shaped by the forces trying to move her, and how stalwart and solid she is in her conviction to stay right there. How you can tell that whatever reason she is standing there, veiled, being pushed by the wind but staying so still against it all the while, is deep enough a part of her that her very being will be shaped by it ever after, like water wearing on stone. That is me. Has been. Busy, stuck and grounded going nowhere. It made me melt a little inside and get a teenybit wet-eyed. Even though the very polite James' buddy grabbed my brother aside and pointed out that the reason he liked the print was cuz of the woman's "poppin booty".

Other than that my big moment of the day was seeing the Full Circle Dance Collective at the Lyric. They performed a shortened version of a piece called the Sacred Body. Exploring the various experiences of religious sublimity and such themes. I love to dance, to let my body go, and this was the first time that watching dance actually made me feel the same exact ecstasy as when it's me doing the moving. I was sitting there in the dark, during the first act called "Supplication", a very Christian theme which I at once struggle with and am enraptured by, and suddenly I was crying. Like sob stifled in my throat so no one could hear me crying. The Sacred Body was intensely religious for me, of the oneness in-bliss, truest kind.

All in all it was an amazingly flowing day. And ohtheirony, it brought me home to me, grounded in thought as I'd been, insistent this year on going my own way. Remembering the bit of good there is in every single side of how one looks at a thing.....

**

First Harvest just past. The birds outside our windows are crazy busy, making nests and gathering food and the noises they make sound like someone digging frantically through a box trying to find some lost piece of something in order to take with him back home before anybody sees it's gone. They flit around a lot. The sun is going further away in the sky. Things are turning. The birds know.


I am going to the beach today. Got a ocean of floating to do.

On Poetics and Diane diPrima

I'm working obscene amounts of double shifts lately. obscene. so yesterday i forced myself in to the obligatory doing absolutely nothing. the night before the prospects of no plans no calls no errands no nada to have to do seemed great, but actually going through with it was a little tough. made me feel less than worthwhile. have always been in to identifying the mean teeth of doubt in my consciousness, the terms of which like a tape looping i or one plays over again throughout the head without really separating out from and seeing, and so take for granted. so i'm programmed to think that taking time off is lazy or gluttonous. go figure--of course i am.

anyhow hell yeah let's hear it for 8 episodes of the first season of SexintheCity woooohooo and also Knocked Up and the very stupid Walk Hard. and front porch time and, oh yes, an hour and a half lazed in bed w my new Vogue and a cup of hot mint tea. got my rest, got my soul full again, got my juices flowing--which was necessary if i want to get a blog in before today's 12 hour shift...

***

So the afternoon before last Laura Walsh and I drove to Newark to U Del to check out the original manuscripts (oh god my heart beats faster and the water tingles in my mouth whenever i say that) of Diane diPrima's Freddie Poems. What is of interest to me here is a fine, exact example of my take on poetics. Firstly, her Freddie Poems, far as I'm concerned, is one of diPrima's clear transitions, visible within the poems themselves, into her experience of poetry as an alchemical function. Thus we witness her own self-transition and initiation, in the alchemical tradition, of go-between if you will, of she who transmutes self and journeys between the outer and inner worlds, or between the levels of consciousness. Secondly, in the exact tradition of this and in a very personal and real way, this piece of diPrima's work specifically impacted my own life many years later. This is a prime function of poet-(or artist)-as-shaman, as Gary Snyder explains in his Real Work interview with Paul Geneson of the Ohio Review (Fall 1977): "For the poet in particular, a sense of the need to look at the key archetypes image and symbol blocks and see if the blocks are working. Poetry effects change by getting at the archetypes and getting at people's dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change..."

You see, diPrima wrote this collection while in the midst of grieving the loss of her close friend to suicide. This was nearly fifty years ago. I discovered the existence of the Freddie Poems when reading her memoirs in the Fall of 03. At that time I too was in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, and keeping a journal to him which would eventually become my first complete collection of poetry. I was actually calling that project the Mike Journal then! And likewise, the experience of chronicling my process of grief and understanding was my induction in to the tradition of poet as journeyer through other forms of consciousness by mere means of creation.

Wow, I am so wholly took by this concept of poetry, or any art for that matter, as means of transcending our ordinary incidences in life by penetrating to a more intuitive and in-depth, in-bliss experience. Seeing the Freddie Poems for the first time, and in their original form! was so powerful for me. I still do not, and likely will never, have words to give justice to how rich an opportunity this was. What I can do, rather, is defer to Snyder again. Reading those poems, finding the eternal echos of archetype and symbology that diPrima encountered, and nodding in recognition that I too found those same rhythms, themes and postures in my own poetry to Mike was a home-coming of the purest sense. It was affirmation of the the most primal patterns of our humanity, of the never ending cycles of lifedeathlife, and it made me beam with love to have this opportunity to exist. It was acknowledgement in my own soul, a deep-breathed sigh of comfort and relief, and mostly of pure elated satisfaction and awe.

From Snyder:

As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. Whatever is or was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation…the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.

Maine Vacay

So. What a trip!? Revelations are funny—how they come so that you don’t even realize you’re experiencing revel, even when you’re right in the middle of it. I am a closet vintage-junkie and particularly when it comes to anything John Watersy Baldamore hon value worthy (think Killer Trash circa old Eastern Ave)--so when we happened on a tumbled into discovery of a shop our first night in a small town on the Southern coastal tip of Maine called York where there was a vintagey photo/poster shop galore, budget or not I had to at least get something. I love it.
Later that night, after checking out the rest of town and me also getting a beaute of a sundress for practically nothing in another little shop, we checked in to the last available cabin at Birchwood Cottages on Rt. 1 in Cape Neddick. Only nite we used the credit card, too, go us.


Later that night (after an early dinner of Lobstah rolls at the first joint we could find the moment we got to York--and of course the proprietor had been to Chestertown) we found a take-out sushi place w rolls for like $4 a piece. Spicy tuna and salmon yummm. We walked York's beach at dark, bought some ice cream and Bran some beer and some cards cuz we forgot ours, then took our sushi back to our cottage, above. Next morning, on suggestion from Lannie Parks at our local bookstore in town we checked out world famous Flo's HotDogs, also in Cape Neddick on Rt. 1.

Check out Gale and her little red shop by the side of the road. She now owns Flo's after taking it over from her mom-in-law (of the famous namesake.) The 61-year-old hotdog stand will be on Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel on July 24 at 10:30 pm. Thanks Lannie. Before hitting Flo's, as an apetizer if you will, we had a pork rib each from the Cat & Nine Tails also on One in Cape Neddick, just because it was already almost 11 am and we were so hungry from our early morning chillychilled swim in the Maine Atlantic and we couldn't wait another second to get to Flo's! Seriously, Maine has rib joints all over the sides of the road. And this little convenient store's goods were SOOOOO good all the same...Next we headed on up 95 to Acadia for a day or so...on the way on Rt. 30 outside Belfast we stopped at the Liberty Trading post to use a port-o-john that you had to "Close your eyes, drop your drawers and back out of" according to Brandon. However, they had the best fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies and for love like that I am such a feign. Ended up a little later at Blackwoods campground where a very happy Brandon discovered us a big ol pile of wood just waiting for a fire...

So, how's this for cool? Over in Bass Harbor, on the far side of Mt.Desert Island, ME, there is this old lighthouse that ran, with a living, flaming light and someone there to tend it the wheel of the day/night around and around for 106 years, non-stop. Keepers changed from every six to ten years or so. Holy hell. That's from 1858 to 1974. Wowowow. So this got me to thinking, and it was probably that night that the revelations slowly began (I'm always always better at this spiritual/self-discovery stuff in retrospect...) to impart themselves like a fog settling, but also breaking at the same time. And I realized this relationship that I have with a friend in Philly had been on my mind all day long, and there, on the edge of the sea, the foghorn blasting and clearly a big storm setting almost in...I couldn't help but realize what a lighthouse does. It guides shipwreck-fearing sailors home from the sea. And there are people out there who tend to that light, day after day, night after night, even when they themselves can't even see the sailors for all the fog or for the huge swallowing sea. So like the Waifs said, Sometimes we need a Lighthouse for our own...And I got this image of a lighthouse there in my emotional shipwreck sea of a heart and soul that's been drowning me on and off for a year or more, and I realize I've got this track of poetry that's sort of been my charting maps through the haze of all this stuff. And this friend of mine who's been like my torch-holding port cuz for some reaason when all this lost stuff started happening so did poems to him, and to all the friends I sort of know through him. Which are more poems to me, the lost me in all of us. It made me, for the first time in months, realize, and have faith again, in my own anchor. The fog started parting. It did me good...going to the Lighthouse, see?

The storm came with the the night and the salty air from the sea and we only got to use about two hours worth of that wood and it was okay, cuz we needed a good long snooze. The next day was the fourth, we were due up to Sorrento that night for Levi's wedding, and had some hiking and swimming first to do. Started out in Southwest Harbor at Cafe 2 with split dishes of Juevos Rancheros and Blueberry Pancakes. Then on to the Farmer's Market, which happens in Southwest Harbor on Mt. Desert Island on Friday as from 9 to 1pm, next to the community center. It was small, but for 8 bucks we got some killer artisan pesto bread, fresh made chipolte goat cheese and a big bag of organic arugula, which fed us snack-style intermittently for the next two and a half days. Hiked Acadia Mountain Trail, swam and snacked at Echo Lake then busted on to Rt. 3 for a stop at a Lobster Pound(these places rip you off as far as I'm concerned, we never did find the "right" one and maybe the right ones don't exist like they did when we travelled in 04. Maybe the whole market for seafood is too commercialized now. Who knows? Maybe back then we just got hella lucky) before heading onward a half hour or so to Three Pines, our Bed & Breakfast in Hancock, ME.
It was about this time that I set down The Vanishing Point, a novel by Mary Sharratt, in favor of my heart's pulling me towards Paulo Coelho's The Witch of Portobello. The poetry, incidentally, had been just pouringpouring out of me. Coelho's book was, as revelations are always meant to be, the right way to go..... As would be the wedding, and most of all, the visits w family and friends to come....the details of which are on their way in a day or two...

Poetry

Reminder
To Me from Me

Can you read a man’s poetry
can you reconcile the difference
play conscientious objector
in your own life?
The art, the nature or our own innate draw
the silly coward way of human nurture
The nature of art is the grand scheme
marshaled by the merits
of awareness
Life is the great art
the grand operatic not how you choose but if you choose to sing

Poetry is the option not the objective
Greatness is a technique based on a quality
of courage
& simultaneous fury-feeling abruptivness of sudden

Action
1.20.08 op,md
*

Little bit of a poem for the day
from Octavio Paz's Sun stone

I search where I come face to face with daylight,
search without finding, I search for a moment,
for a face of lightening-flash and thunderstorm
running among the enormous trees of night,
face of all rain in a garden of shadows,
insistent water that flows along my side,

I search without finding, and I write alone,
No one is here, and the day ends, the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment, all the way down,
The road is invisible over all these mirrors,
They repeat the days, the moments pave this roadway,
I step upon the thinking of my shadow,
I pace my shadow in search of my one moment,

I seek the day live as a live bird....

*
Thank you Octavio. Getting ready to go to Maine on Wednesday. Ahhhh quite whisper of tall pine trees....

List

1. I have all these big dreams. They look like:
   *Write a chapbook that becomes a hit underground success. It is on the discontentedness of youth, nay—the American experience. It should look like an experiential guide of how the artist blazes her own trail instead of “following” where society thinks she ought to go
   *Make great pieces of art with paints and papers, ribbons and the woods
   *Hold poetry/self-expression conventions
   *Bring people together for music, for good, fresh food and people/idea sharing and celebration and true real martyrdom of our each and every individual very good thing
   *Stop being so god-damned self-obsessed
   *Reiki circles of charm and healing the earth, starting here in our own little community under the stars
   *Live by the sea
   *Know mountains, and the herbs and brush that grow under and through them
   *Know the earth, and help others to know her and help sing her song
   start a foundation, for the young, the women, the people of great discontent. A foundation for all those of little means, harness all that, make something beautiful out of all our unfounded dreams
   *Do something with my life. Worthwhile. Be a good friend, be an honest woman. Be someone not afraid of following her own big dreams.
   *Set out to and travel about the world
2. I get caught in circles. I can’t avoid it. I get sad, angry, lazy, lethargic. I stop believing. I am dull inside. It is anger, anger aches in me. It runs so deep I secretly believe it is actually harmonic.
3. I wait tables, I hate it, it is a dream gone sour. I keeps me from gatherings at nighttime, from organizing, from living a life I thought I could imagine.
4. I make excuses.
5. I believe that if I have any other job there wont be enough creative time to do the things I say I should. I am good at waiting tables.
6. My time has come!
7. I hate Chestertown because there are no god jobs. I hate Chestertown because there is no way to employ myself other than waiting tables or working in a local non-profit or government run social service agency and that makes me hopeless and perpetuates my belief in the futility of the current system and all its fouls and no goods. I want to be someone strong enough powerful enough to believe in her own vision but I look around and see no out. I try to be grateful because that’s what they, people, my network, recovery, tells me I should be and I am grateful just look out the window on to my farm! But that doesn’t change the scope of things. That doesn’t help me to rest or feel settled or not come undone.
8. My man doesn’t understand but doesn’t judge. That makes it so hard to talk to him and even harder not to judge.
9. I love places other than here. Doesn’t matter where, a small shitty town dirty by the sea. A mountain organic land full of like minds and dreams. A Mexican village of poverty and no means.
10. I get angry at myself and feel like my problem is within, must change my perception, must be someplace inside me free of ego and of blame. Angry that I can’t just be grateful. Fearful that I will always be miserable and in some stage of trying desperately to get what I want. I see this aspect of myself and am instantly convinced that the real problem is my insatiable ego telling me I want what I want and have to have it now. So I work on taming the ego instead which how do you do that!!? Fix your own broke human head with your own broke human head!!? And before you know it I get consumed with all-knowing spiritual righteousness and self-criticism and damn it Kelly why can’t you just be well? Then I am immobilized, I take no action because all the great traditions tell me peace is in this moment. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? Right?
11. Fuck that.
12. “You just need a good job and some money to make you comfortable. To feel like you’re worth it.”
13. I am worth it.
14. I want to be great, to do great things, to share this knowledge inside and to not be so afraid of my extremes. I want the willingness to insist upon nothing but don’t believe in that in my own heart of things.
15. What if I’m crazy?
16. How can people not be voraciously hungry for what is deep down inside of them?
17. That is me. I am. I make no excuses for it.
18. Except for sometimes, when I do.
19. I am crazy, no? At the end of the day at least I got that, and that is nothing to blame or to try to be or figure out or to stop or to know. I am crazy, hungry. And thank god--grateful as hell.
    
    

God in Truth is Lies

I have faith in God. But ugghhghg, even as I write that it seems so lame. I have faith in God—in every lasting miracle of life of which life itself is a breathing example of —look outside, just look beyond your nose, or else stop a while, feel the air at the bottom of your nose, the way the dryness passes among the hairs there in their little rows. Look out past wherever you are this moment, this gaping fillhole of experience that calls to you: look at the air between the you and the other, look at the candle in the holder on the counter the bronzed statue of the roman on his knees melted wax dried dripping down his back, the toy poodle on the beige throw rug at your feet the way his head cocked to one side looks confused like trying to figure out why you are looking down at him, the crumpled tissues next to your laptop on your desk, the pot of coffee across the room gone cold. I have faith in life, see—in the very miracle—wondrous, mysterious, of existence going on about me, and I do not shy away from calling that my own reasonable belief in god, which to me is all things.

The god of my understanding—tho I suppose it isn’t “a” god at all. It is funny to me the way people—myself included, I often do it—cast judgments based on our own perceptions or ideas or applications of a word. I do it all the time, that word, God, it still makes me cringe. With an eye roll I’ll look on, incredulous inside myself if someone I don’t know well brings that up that word and starts going on. Like the funny looks I get from people who don’t know me too well when I talk about going home and needing to pray! I don’t know about this god-head thing: I struggle with my own old trapping of a god-head, of some figment out there in the midst looking over at me, silent-talking and creepily laughing at all I say and claim and think and do. These old Catholic remnants of my childhood come up and all the mores of society that wordlessly perpetuate such norms. But if I am going to lay claim to this belief in a godhead that I struggle with than at least I will be strong enough to make it my own—because it is in fact, my own internalized belief, my own rigid system of self-judgment and denial. I’m too intellectual to believe fully in such a framework, but my intellectualism is so counter-alloof it perpetuates it: what I mean is the idea of a god-head is so complex, so deep down in me and well a part of me that I unknowingly function in the preexistent framework of it all the same, no matter what I do. So I find myself walking around with the judge in my head, always in some varying degree of verdict and blame placed on myself and my own drama of trying to think my way out of it.

It’s not as awful as it sounds. But it is the dictate of a stronger that normal conscience because admittedly I am a woman of extremes. My real belief, in the oneness of things, informs me that it is just me doing the judging and the blaming, hauling the call of guilt all around. Just me and my perfectionism, busy creating god in an image, judgmental, of the darker shadow sides of me!! When my fear is great I am too blind to be in my bliss, I get strung-up and stuck in my head and stop listening to my own myth and stop following my own heart. I stop trusting in the lightness and life of this current moment. And when I stop trusting, when I stop having faith in my own current, working conception of what God experientially has proven to be in my own life, then I pick up my old God, my old tortured systems of belief and being.

Ughghg, god bless this sacred neurosis! This funny human way I have of being.

Anyhow, my faith is with me today, along with my laughter. It feels good. It’s nice to look around with joy in this moment, to look around with faith enough simply to be still…..

Poem today (involving neurosis…)
for Josh

"Little Joke" or
"My Ways"
or "Digressions are how I get there"

I’m sorry,
I’m sorry for my drama. These funny witchy ways
About me. These ways of making consequence
against me
of
It always comes back to me &
Figuring things out. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my ways.
I truly Am
I feel like-- for a thousand years I’ve tried
to tell you this.

But? That’s just me again, Drama? The self-inflicted (get it?
Self—that’s
My Way
making
little joke

my eyebrow notch, bravery or
mockery
whatever me my way
reckoning—recognizing
myself (oooops there I go again
truth is not true
My Self—joke again))

drama of art is my Nature These energy swirls I get caught in—avoid? And then I think—about me—it can’t be true again? Guilt, fuck fuck guilt again?
Then there’s

Avoid the dance? Me? I’m sorry—

Never. It is new moon, I am
Wiling against myself again—
You are on the run.
(you are. check—)

I am home, moon
Moonface, dark gun. Or
dark, sweet fruit dripping down the sides like Rum
Or No thing Nothing, the blank stretch
of this misery, how it tastes so sweet
fun
to those in love
like me, how much we LOVE
the ride! The ride is what
the blank stretch the whole of life presence blank, unfestered or even recognized
unto its self...the ride is what? (Monogamy is pointless we all know that.
Has nothing to do w that.)
we come here for some kind of reckoning w
Our Power. Our lies being told. Not meant to be mean
just me eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ahhhhhhhhhh

**
I am sorry. I am sorry for this
For this, for my ways, for lasagna. Tastes so good
On my farm, in my garden. Read Diprima about me
Take action, ride a bike, plant a garden
Watch tv or buy a god. Find god. It will still
All be the same and I will be sorry
Feasting a while, always to come back come back again
(circle [spiral circle] Circle) spiral
--The light is like gold --
and I will come back again always to this gold, golden grain
--there is knowledge in this,
alchemical let it inform You
(we are smarter than
our selves)—
in this pain, the most mild
& gentle elixir

I will be chief among these to go. I will always be. And
I am sorry—
I will always take you with me. Even to death
& beyond. A thousand seas have bent before me
a million clouded skies. This is our Code. I have it

broke before

your eyes

Sorry I AM for this

**

But not really

The Tao of Dirty: On Maryland's Heat

“My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesque, viz. ‘Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I’d hit her with a brick.’ Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” –e.e. cummings, 1926

The Mare-lin mug came to Chestertown this morning, showed up without question, severely, certainly, without a moments chance or warning. We were sitting around outback under the Chinese Chestnut swatting some minor nats but other than that oblivious even to the slow creeping seasons—forgetful of the fact that by this time last year we were swamped and muggy by even the first of May—when bam, next thing you know it, literally over night it went to swamp here, full on soup like only I think we know on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

I. Love. The Heat. Here is a small known fact about me: I love it, I love the heat, the sweat back of your neck the moan when you arch your back cuz of the cement-bone sludge-muscle feeling the slow moving creek of air the stretch it takes to wipe the sweat from under your shirt always wet and the sweat on your brow and round your face always always dripping down. I hate it too, don’t get me wrong, the way the water does nothing but soak your mirror when you get out of your shower no sense in drying cuz if you aint got air your gonna stay wet—I hate the bloodboiling redface I get walking out to my car or outside to get the mail. But I love it too, I love it sooooo, see? I love the drama of it—the very Quintessential Life it draws out of me.

Maybe it comes from this summer sense I’ve always got about me, that barefoot beachhugging thing I was born with, that need to be by the sea. And spending so many summers there, downtown dirty Ocean City, where to be there in the mix of things to really be there is to be dirty. The dust and grit of the always everywhere sand. The bareness of things: Me next to the ocean on instincts and cycles alone the way only a fancy free eighteen year old can be, learning the tides that move and grow you that draw you open, raw and unafraid to every part of the you of who you are. I’ll never forget the place off the boardwalk where I first lived barefoot next to the dirty sand and the brown Atlantic sea. Pungent scent of boy on the air, re-circulated from the window fan, dense from the closed windows in the ninety degree heat to keep the stench of pot and drugs inside. The outback alleyway with the condoms the fratboys who lived above us at night threw over their shoulders, out the upstairs windows and away and me and how I’d go out there angry at them little bit of clothes on all redfaced and scream. The rubber kiddie pool on our front porch that led out the street, tepid water and the beer cans floating there and me. The flea-stuffed couch, spilled bong water and stains on the greasy carpet, sweaty skin stuck with dog hair, empties of bottles in the corners and stacked on the tables and no empty counter space to be found. The fan just made the heat hotter and at night, long after the pier shut down and the of-agers were out getting their bar on at the clubs through out town—we’d open that place up, let the funk-air all out like a balloon slow-leaking or maybe more like a tire suddenly gone Pop! So you could hear the great whoooosh of air and relief that comes. And up til then you think you’re in a state of neglect but really it’s just the tension you feel that ever perennial state of necessity us humans don’t like of stagnation, the Art of Building Up. And woah we would let it goooooooooo, on acid maybe or half-drunk on the forties we claimed for free when the clerk wasn’t looking cuz he was out back with my boy Kevin getting stoned while we were raiding the back fridge for beer our pockets full of weed…We would come home to 6th Street and open up that place and in that moment it was as much our dirty little pad as it was all the Oneness of the sea…And often, many nights we would free ourselves to that, too, to that energy, that explosion, run legs pumping in the 3am dark all the way down to the white flash of oceancaps that marked the end of the beach and jump in, and wash out, because to be so dirty is to be So clean….

I lost that somewhere—that rope to my past. Cling on to anything too tight it chokes you, my doom forever has been my sentimental melancholy. And of course, intrinsic to the passion of moments is a willingness to ride it with the awareness of always being able to let it go. I worry too much these days, get all concerned with am I doing the right thing. We call this maturity, to be adult! To worry! I do believe the primary principles are love and openness and tolerance, and perhaps this has given me a well-deserved measure of calm. But wow I fool myself too much, fall too easily into so much mulling-over that I’ll easily give over the legs I claim to stand on because I want to be that Well. So the heat, the summer, is good for me, reminds me we all got some funk, too, to give.

I think cummings would agree. He’d say Cut all this bullshit (if he were present day colloquial,) and be willing to be you. Learn for you. Knowledge, he thought, was good but what mattered was the wisdom that comes from experience, and this comes only from the individual human heart. So he probably wouldn’t shy away from saying at the end of the day, admittedly: yeah, if I’m going to admit to living, then I’ll admit to humanness and nothing more.

Awareness of our imperfection—perfect as it gets. I find freedom in that, of the purest kind. This secret lust I get out of the sudden coming heat. The way it makes me feel miserable and pent up, but helps me remember suddenly: So this is what it feels like To Be Alive.

Poem for the day by e.e. cummings
for Kevin (and Chaucer!!?)

Honour corruption villianly holiness
Riding in fragrance of sunlight (side by side
All in singing wonder of blossoming yes
Riding) to him who died that death should be dead

Humblest and proudest eagerly wandering
(equally all alive in miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the earth of the sky

knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun
merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve
and Geoffrey and all) come up from the never of when
come into the now of forever come riding alive

down while crylessly drifting through vast most
nothing’s own nothing children go of dust

Poem for Today, for Mike, cuz my friends save my ass w out even knowing it...

“We don’t live for ourselves; we are interconnected. We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night that gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway, and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.” Natalie Goldberg


Amen. And god bless, goddess bless, Namasté. These are sentiments I would, do, did, mutter to myself when I read this, or anything like it. Such words are my way of acknowledging the little present flutter of joy that moves in my heart naturally as means of saying yes, yes, I get that, too! I live for such feeling, such acknowledgment. It’s been stuck in my throat lately, though. That’s what happens when I, as an artist, feel that little flow or aha and stop my natural progression of opening to it. It takes so damn much of my energy to do so, to halt that flow and not allow it to come posturing out in the form of a poem or writing or in a simple lightness of being that I end up feeling numb. Then the shame—self-judgment—comes. And then I really rally against myself. What are you doing with your life, where are you going, what’s the point, why why why? And then I don’t, I haven’t, gotten a damn thing done.

Initially this started when I paused in my writing and blogging to have a friend help me with building a website. I gave myself an excuse: oh I’ll just quit writing til we’re done, til we get my blog fed in to my website. Of course this led to me spending far more time day by day in my head, trying to control and manage all my little life details up there. My energy, transfixed before I knew it, stuck on creating life how I want it. My heart doomed with the terrible sucking feeling in the morning because nothing at all is happening for me and yikes, the great paradox being that indeed nothing was happening because I was so drained by all my energy focused on nothing happening! And maybe this is what I hate the most, what I’ve learned the most in the 9 months since I quit teaching to focus on writing: it requires that I write. And for this artist, writing requires discipline. Which sometimes looks like drudgery: sweatpants and dirty hair and forcing myself to sit in this hardback chair drinking acidic coffee and stopping to have to get the damn laundry done. Which is the exact opposite of my vision of the ecstatic moonbeam worshipping sultry sleeky earth-goddess dark diva zipping and lala laughing and loving her way easily through life and love and art with a magic touch and a Done!! No, discipline is not an easy task for me, but one worth the hard long fight. And actually, I like the way the warm sun feels on my stretched-out arms, the yearn in my heart as I weight the clothes-line with the heavy wet towel or my work uniform knowing my work is upstairs waiting mid-sentence for me. The sound of the cows in the distance. The hum of my computer. My cat on her back spread out legs hanging off the chair she’s cozied up in, funny look on her face like I’m the strange one. All the empty coffee mugs and tears of paper on my desk. The yearn in my heart for this all. Discipline takes me back to these things, to my life. Back to my art, to the nature of things.

In recovery from alcoholism you learn about that funny little twist of mental obsession and how it dominates you and sucks you lonely and bedraggled through your day. You learn it is part of the disease of alcoholism. Chief among the disease is the ego and its Napoleaonic governing and how it confuses you with delusions of how much you actually think is in your control. The ego uses its loud chatter to accomplish this, the ways it has of talking at you, and you at it. You drink to relieve this mental strain, this burden of the mentally anxious always obnoxious wrestling match in your own brain. This time it will be different and so on…Thus drinking isn’t actually the problem as much as it is the solution. But I think that this tendency towards mental looping and strain isn’t limited at all to alcoholics. I am convinced that it is simply the human condition. Sick and stuck on our fears and our own ambitious beliefs in the common little wart we all share, our dastardly egos. My shaman fried says the ego can not exist in the present moment, it can only be activated by our worries about what the future will amount to or by our judgment of our past. So our judgments or speculating in any given moment amount to the sum total of joy we are experiencing Right Now. In other words, if you can be present, in the present, Conscious of the moment and your breathing nose or mouth, your beating heart, your blinking eyes, the way the tree leaves move the wind across the street or the field, how the light blinks off the grocery cart wheel or how that little child looks right now with chocolate smeared across her fat cheek…in this way you can love, you can be the moment connected not in mind but in Being with all else. You can live the ecstatic ordinary and this is all there is…

So that’s why I write. Got that Kelly? To capture this, this sacred moment, to experience in-union, to dance together as the words come rushing out, to feel the spark, that joy flutter, to share what lay in my heart and in doing so, to lay down what matters upon your own.

Poem for Today

My friend Mike’s birthday was last week, so was Leah’s. These are fantastic, original people who inspire me to live the same way writing does. They are farm people—Mike by birth, right here in Kennedyville not two miles from Anngar Farm, with the dust and manure, the cow droppings and moans outside on the wind making up his everydays. The dry corn husks fluttering across his playground, brought down every season by the fall. Leah came to this life, to this type of farm life, with her pensive esoteric Christian punk rock husband, who I unknowingly grew up with in the suburb complexes of counties stretched out between Baldamore and DC at the same punk rock shows in the same firehalls with sticky bathroom stalls and black gum stains on the floor and stale grease smells in the dark halls. Fugazi. Nope. Mustard Seed Magic….Her and her husband now in a strung together farm house in Queen Anne’s county held up by her baubles and scrumpy cats and their love. I still owe her a flowered crown for her birthday….We have potlucks together, celebrate birthdays and the passings of seasons and the moon. Leah and her husband and the rest of our hodgepodge band of pop-culture-gone-rural country crew. Mike doesn’t come to these gatherings because he lives in Manhattan now but steamed crabs, in Maryland, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where he’s from outback that old farmhouse of his in Kennedyville, is how he’ll celebrate his birthday this week, how he celebrates it every year. Details. The classic details of our miniscule existences, how we humans are gifted with the power to transform every living day in to our own kind of tiny miracle.


Happy Belated Birthday friends.

Amen.

Long poem for
Mc Ades

What is this madness? I only seem
to Know. I only claim.
My only.

The beauty of this world.
The beating & the fueling
the fucking
of all things
keeps us Alive.

The beating wings of that animal flap
The thrashing of those others in the garden
The associations we draw forward
from that
to that

This is ALL pure, man.

The light
The light there, in your eyes
is in mine.
Transfixed gleam.
( )

The city tops, the city steps
Where you sleep
Where your gun falls down
Where you drop
to your knees
Where, on some leveled street labeled Paradise
your queen, your vicious vicious Queen
returns & you
you Masquerade
torrents of beauty dance
you spin & turn what beauty in this dance
what madness this Quest ahhhh all this confounded
Wondering. Wonder-Ing ahhhh hhh Wonder
Your Soul the Clown, friend
Your soul on which the fire breathes.

White heat red flame transfigures, white ash. Transfixed heat. Transcends.
The Beauty. The Simple marvel Beauty. Of this.

¨

On this farm, this form
which you gave Me.
You are always in my backyard?
Which means when we turn we are the same
within. You’re on my land, I am on yours, this
Great consequence of Life only means a thing if we
Garner Nothing To It. I Know.
The fire, the fires Burn Bright
Chinese Elm out back. Great Fire Barrel Sam procured.

The choking back, the choking on, the delicious smoke.

The dust I brought, you brought
Home. How you rejuvenate reinvent Cleanse.

How you Bath Yourself. To be made Clean.

The dust settles. Great cities of Paradise yearn in you again.
Long car ride, home.

I’ll share a cigarette with you,
anytime my friend.

*

How I Got Here or I Love This Computer

I love this computer. My parents gave me this computer when I went away to college in Chestertown. Chestertown, a word that sings to me, a word that either goes up a little with my heart at the end, or else ends its self in short, clipped doom. There is no in-between. I was 21 that year and this was before I knew C-town, before I’d ever visited here. I applied in May to Washington College. Spring was at it’s end, I was spending long days in the sun at the park a block away from the community college I was attending in order to stay on dad’s health insurance. The park was hidden quiet away in a neighborhood. The neighborhood was full with brick houses that had tulips and black shutters and lots of crocus’s and bunches of thickly cushioned green grass, lots of barking dogs. It hid me, a special spot where I could go after class to swing or to write and hide away by the pink flowering buds of lots of springtime trees.

God, I love this computer. It’s old, the keys are all stained, there are literal dust bunnies stuck between the top rows of numbers and all those F-commands I never learned how to work. There are wax spots, melted drips from candles burnt over the years and years that I’ve written perched here over this keyboard. And there are coffee marks, old wine patterns, and inevitable dirt that’s nothing but dark stain now. I love this computer, the dirt-grooves fit my fingers, make the keys feel somehow more smooth. The discolored plastic around the screen is covered with tiny worn images: glued-on horoscopes browned along the edges; taped messages and reminders to me in the form of quotes from other artists, living or long-past; a little picture of myself cut in a circle, staring out from the high cliffs above the Sassafras River the first time that Brandon took me there, dressed in my gray sweater with all the knits and my thick and thrifty second-hand vest. These images, they are small enough that you can miss them if you’re not looking for them, I often do, the way we take in something long known and dear to us all at once. How my computer’s energy is that way—that certain subtle flow of mystique that exists when for so long we’ve come to know something—and how we appreciate it in part by taking for granted that it remains true, or anyway, somehow unchanged.

I had a boyfriend when I first discovered that park near the community college. His mom lived in one of the many suburban complexes that hedge out from the school and define the middle-class roads all along the circuit there, the sprawling corridor between Annapolis and Baltimore running parallel alongside the Chesapeake Bay. This, this placeless place of suburb stretch is where I’m from, this placeless place that’s still a place to me: Where I Grew Up. Joe was his name, the boyfriend whose mom lived near the park, and we met at Applebee’s where he was the bartender and I an upper-middle class white wannabe ghetto girl convinced I was too smart for Academia and stuck on a resentment at my Catholic School Upbringing.

I was waiting tables when he and I first met. I had an affinity for purple and polyester and people with edge and boys that wore hooded-sweatshirts. He saved me from me, from my own kind of common overdose on me, that polyester hot-pants fake-nails part of me, with his Red Chevy and short curly locks, his white-blue eyes and especially his hard-rock guitar.
It is him I credit for getting me to Chestertown, all these years later, I wonder if he knows? The way the story goes is like this: Joe was a rock-star to everyone that met him, and he to himself but the secret was he could only see it in himself shining back from someone else’s eyes. I still wonder about him, especially about his case—the older I get the more it seems to me that this is the story for many of us. He had a quiet charm that came out in his fast smile, a capability to see into the eyes of someone and tell all about their soul, and a heart that never wanted to but that he was convinced was doomed to let everyone down. I loved him. Straight away and from the first second: I loved him. He was one of the two men in the whole span of my life whose inherent, immediate connection to my spirit brightened me for one clear reason: Joe soothed me. He soothed and smoothed me all out on the inside. He had a settling presence and effect on me, like that you might associate with a calming beach wind.

It was not long before he established himself as the one the McMullen family expected to take in as our own, on behalf of me. Back then, at 21, as the oldest of all my cousins (with the exception then of my one who was estranged for a marriage she made happen on her own, sans family,) it was totally common and acceptable to think that marriage was soon to be in my cards. That’s what my good Irish Catholic Baltimore working class lineage and strong strong pride of tribal upbringing had me convinced that I wanted (a good old-fashioned, well-drunken wedding, at the Roland Terrace Democratic Club in the bowels of Brooklyn Park, with a social service career to follow, no less). And if I was anything back then other than an upper-middle class white girl resentful of her Catholic roots, I was also a McMullen, equal parts prideful and resentful, an all-encompassed, gregarious tribe member of the new generation of Mc’s to come. I was even studying to be a social worker, and Joe, to us all, fit the tribe-eyed husband-fine bill. He was at Grammy’s funeral, helped us clean out her old house at 436 Church Street, Brooklyn Park.

I was crushed when the relationship suddenly ended. Of course, that term, suddenly, when used in context with a romantic relationship, is generally anything but…denial, I’d say, is most certainly applicable for its anesthetizing purposes. So yeah, somewhere behind my closed eyes I knew Joe and I were having a few troubles. Maybe I even aggravated them, I mean it’s always been funny to me the way one person’s unspokens are able to pull all out and mix all up with the secret hidden ones that the other person seems to barely know are there. So maybe one of my unspokens was my hot attraction at the time to this other guy Joe. He was a barback at the new restaurant on the docks of Annapolis, Pusser’s Landing, where I started working after getting fired from Applebee’s. I was fascinated with Pusser’s being the place to be. Either way, and as those details are clearly for other stories and you dear reader are now learning to pardon my at times incidental digressions, the first Joe and I broke up.

It was a busy Friday night in April in Annapolis. It was foggy and damp out like April ought to be and the moisture was rising right off the streets of Annapolis and down by the Bay the way only Annapolis can make a Bay stir and sit on the air. And I had just got of work, and the Friday night gold-and-shadows-lit bar crowd at Pusser’s was starting to thump with the arrival of a wedding party from the Marriot upstairs, and Joe called for me at the hostess stand right there next to the bar, next to all the action. And I got on the phone to talk to him about the Dave Matthews show we were going to in Roanoke the next morning. And he said I decided not to go. Which I guess I knew would happen somewhere down deep inside me. And I was the one who said, what? What’s wrong with you, are you wanting to break-up? And he was the one who said yes.

Needless to say it is this fact, the fact of my shock over losing him after fourteen months, which changed something in me. It re-birthed my need to fly. I was broken-hearted, in flux between sullen wine-soaked misery and head-to-the-back-wall-of-the-couch-in-the dark-basement-at-mom’s sulky doom. I made it to class but at work felt embarrassed, everyone saw me cry that night when I hung up the phone.

My dad was the one who saved me: come like a hero up from Virginia where he lived and worked to order some gin and steamers at Pusser’s bar one night as I cocktailed. And he said Sis, (which is what he always calls not only me but my also his youngest sibling, my Aunt Sue,) first thing you need to do is write him a letter, tell him how you feel, then rip it up and turn the page. Then maybe you could think about getting out of here (I was telling him, you know, how it was time for me to hit the road.) Maybe, he continued, you can check out that writing school, the one on the Shore, the one your mom’s always talking about…

What do you know? Less than five months later, (or almost exactly ten years later, depending on the point of time we’re referencing) and look where I ended up…