Spontaneous Download

Who am I writing to if not ever to me? It’s been a hell of a year. A hell of one. A long one, one that negates any prior necessity of predisposed positioning (there it is again, that garble tongue defense mechanism keep them in circles and you can get out before they even know they’ve been spun) and just tells you one day: there you are, here I am, and most of all: Forget it all. How the hell did this happen.

I don’t know what I want to say. Poetry comes out used to only to him. The ovulatory time gets here and I am caught up on some man, every time, and all my thirsty creative energy goes out the door in long timeless bouts of headtrip and daydream. This is better than it going out on Adult Ed? I tell myself. But it is true, I am only third cycle in to my new life…had to get him out of my system last go round and it worked, it really did he is not even with no power now but simple and straight, not there, and that is the first time I ever wrote that scared as I always was that it would jinx things. That somehow without him the ovulatory release wouldn’t come again? And yet it did, it does…and it scares me the difference it really does. And makes me smile because, what else can I do? And chill Kel you are the one of all who always has to tell others—so this time just tell yourself: accept yourself all of yourself for where you are this moment and do not judge. It’s ok if there is always some man. I just remembered a dream I had last night, a large house in the woods on a corner of the ocean, on an island it reminds me in my aftersight of Vinyl Haven. It reminds me of Todd. I’ve been drinking coffee like mad not for all the work I am doing but for the late night fun I’m keeping, so even my sleep feels buzzed and sort of live-wired. It is light on the back porch, light air, light noise in the trees. One time a long time ago I used to sneak out from here out the side window of Tim and Mary’s bedroom and sneak through the secret patterned paths through the woods. Todd’s house Kohuts Lemers and more. Even longer time ago before that I used to go bikeriding just before night in the dusk to explore all the different side roads that led to more and more undiscovered parts of Ocean Pines. I hate it when things don’t make sense, a month ago they did, I was on fire, I had a book to write and so much poetry and little projects and pictures to make and send to friends. Now I am confused again, so much unknown, it is retrograde time before the equinox, time of the great review and rest before the shift. And what is happening to me is hard to pin down I hate it, hate it when I am not in control. Witness witness that is all there is right now to do… That is the great secret of me, the one that only the truest friends know. My free spirit is only free because it's the result of the last great opposition inside me. I WANT TO BE IN CONTROL. So I challenge myself, even, especially, finally, with that….

The other thing is that to be honest scares people. People exist and function in their categorized boxes: to say I am confused, equivalent of this in people’s head she is not happy. That is funny, lacks the process and any semblance of the grand picture, so myopic all about meeeeeee! Reflex reflexivity. Shows zero intuitive capacity, no real sense of the mystery or even a thumbprint idea of the design. I am more than happy, so happy it makes me giggle to think about my life and also makes me smile. I am an ace the ace and the wild card, able to be happy in whatever circumstance I am given to roll in because that is life and I want to live all I can while I’m here. Center in the moment and open to exactly what is in front of you happening right now. What else is there than that? It’s just that living sometimes, living the moment is being full of unanswers, and that is hard, but hard only means process, not bad. She tells herself. If that doesn’t work get some sleep. Sunshine, or water. Ahhh this very long year I don’t even remember who it was I used to be…Mercury retro scrolls like this it is tough to contain, it is tough because you are in limbo hanging there in the water and the water is a ripcurrent and you’re afraid if you go under there is no air. On Sept 12 we will come out, the quickening will occur then and then—equinox onthesamedayexactly as the full moon!!!! O people, if you only understood. If only you took a minute, looked over your own order to the Ordered Nature of things, easiest way to it just go sit outside a moment on the lawn. Listen, listen to the noise, elemental, of the days. Listen to the trees sway, listen to feel the airbreathbreeze. Warm your blood in the sun. The answers are there, nothing else, no need to run. It’s been a long year, PS, I love you, says the moon, the sun, the trees. And me.

At the Hard Bean

Is this Jack White I ask her and she says yes, and listens intently with a look on her face like to listen causes her a little strain. Then she says yes it is his second album, I am like his biggest fan. Is it mostly more lyric driven like this or does he rock out as much too I ask her and she says really it's a nice mix of both you should get it it's way better than Elephant. Better than self-titled I say and take my cookie from her which she just pulled out of the microwave and my mouth waters a little even though I am watching much as I can my sugar regimen since the holidays are over and there were many many days where I only ate chocolate chip cookies and drank coffee. Yes she says. Better than self-titled.

Then Modest Mouse comes on and I am happy I am here. They are St. Johnny's, both these kids: her with the red red lipstick and pale skin and sparkling ball in her labret. Him with his funny half-afro and terrible enourmous faux silver cross hanging on the chain link thick as the chain wallets we used to wear. As if to respond to my affection for Modest Mouse him with thescratchy broom switch switch switch on the old wood floors turns up the music in his earphones almost so I can hear it better than the stuff on the speakers.

After I sit down and the cold wears off I take off my jacket and think about the phone call I just had. About hearts and being nervous and how it is sometimes, when you're like me with great great doses of faith that are just inborn and live inside you there without any help just a gift. That to lose your asset; to lose your honesty if that's your gift or song if that's your gift well to lose your faith when that's who you naturally are how it makes it so you truly are the most hopeless person that you know. Inverse relationship of who we are and how we do. To be capable of great oppositte doses of exactly who we say we are and vice versa. How everything is true. Including the lie. Mercury is retro it's now that we have windows in especially to those funny little twists of self like that. What we think we take for granted about ourselves. O harkened shot of ego...Life is funny that's what it is, I know I know.

Erika will be here soon.

When I look up again the nerdy black guy with the half-grown afro is standing still as sand in the middle of the room reading his text. What could it say? I can practically hear him breathing. God all us humans. All us humans with all these hearts.

How do we possibly do it???

On a creative witchy mind

I dont know, this might be hard to relate to, but a friend of mine told me once that I am a spiritual archivist not just my own but for all of our friends. I was thinking of this tonight when I uploaded some pics onto my computer: 150 shots from Thanksgiving through this weekend. I almost never, ever wait that long between events to unload shots, but life has been hectic and I am walking along inside of it, tired but not weary, just moment to moment and wow have my moments been full.

And I do, I do: I keep track of the cycles of my self, and everyone around me. I dont just mentally acknowledge things, I mean I have a literal requiem storehouse on those that I count as tribe members, close friends and Knectors to my soul. I can't articulate this circuit board that goes on, but I am always filtering in the details, hearing their stories, processing their tales, then processing back for them the current myth or tide they are riding. I dont even realize it it's just what I do. I mark passings, and everyone's peaks and tides, by various means of traditional and non-traditional poles. Like today, the new moon, most powerfull tide passing time of year. All over the place people I know are witnessing: they are starting brand new goals; or taking pause; or hitting pinnacles in current circumstances; this is how we do, how we rise, how we flow, how we pass, how we current ever so swiftly or softly along. Somehow in my head I always easily see others big pictures for how it all easily is weaving together.

I guess what got me thinking about this was uploading these pics tonight, in that it'd been so long since I'd done so. I immediately caught myself nodding: ahhh yes, a quickening just occurred, I went through three whole weeks of straight archiving rather than also organizing and cataloging. My lens backed up and resharpened: in that time the poetry and magic and words have been flowing through me like mad. I've even been penpal-ing with someone the whole time: all of it, all those examples of capturing what is happening all around. A quickening, a quickening of the tide.

And the wind here, when it gets blowing, has been blowing like crazy just like last year on the last day of the calendar year. Winds so high the Choptank River and Elliot Bay both looked like the ocean at high tide.

Dont think it's a joke the old saying winds of change. Folk lore is some of the wisest medicine we have, yes? Everything at all times around us always is eternal reality of creative present moment. Our fates whisper in the wind sure as on the radio or in the trees.

Wild whipping winds tonight on the Eastern Shore.

Winter Solstice is coming: get it guys? Monday it all peaks, right before our closed--or if you're brave and learning to fight for it--at least half-opened eyes... What changes will come what changes are already half on their way?

Poetry vs poetry and First thought, best thought

Ever since the little river started or since I surrendered anyhow and agreed to jump in I haven't been sleeping well. As alluded to before, that can trip me out cuz for someone such as me who has psycho-mania in her catalogue not sleeping can be a dangerous thing. But it's not, not now, and that is the cool thing--I am awake at 4, or 2, or not sleeping at all--or only for two hours or so this week when I get home from what all week were 12 hour days and I'm like whatever, I'm going with it. It's like Bobby Ray the shaman said once years ago, it's only your fear that will keep you sick...

Anyhow since for me writing is Queen and blogging has become part of my practice, part of the discipline of my smithing away at this craft--in very much the first thought best thought style or what I've taken to calling spontaneous download--I thought I better jump on here and give some time to my practice. And then there's the act of writing poetry, different as I explained to a new writer friend just yesterday or no that was two days ago by now, than Poetry capital P which to me is an ethic, a tribe, or value--a state of not just being touched by the madness but alluring and living in it all the same: the saying of the Holy Amen. But as a wordsmith, as a practitioner of art actually writing poetry is different than say the practice of just first thought best thought, and also different than memoir writing. It includes it, but becomes too a strange cohesion of like, sitting in my boat on the river but keeping too a mild hand at all times on the oar. But not using it for paddling, more as like a rutter, that with the slightest touch does indeed effect the trajectory of surface gliding, but only in as much as a pebble might effect a ripple, and the water and the boat--the whole experience of the trip ultimately is of the same...

I wrote poems yesterday so that is why I am thinking so to speak aloud. No, that was two days ago--in the morning, five good poems that remind me a lot of that November in 03 when I was in my little room off my studio apartment on Mt.Royal. The poems and momentum that started my litmag Cantalma and also was the beginning of Fishing Rock.

Ahhh, hello little river. You fucking ho! Careful what you wish for sometimes? I wouldn't change it tho, wouldn't change it at all not even in exchange for the world...

Shampoo My Planet & call me X

You know, it's late and I put in over 10 hours today and have to be back it at 8 tmrw. But I've been up blog rolling and living in the cyber dream of future days when I have my little shack & it's all tribe and art and self-education and off the books schooling of new generations of tribe and calling and new fearless ethics and Poetry as Real Work and so on and yea, it's late, and this little river, and, well you know...I could go on and on.

Anyway. Serendipity!? I got in to all this meat on Friday in my memoir, wrote for 5 and a half hours at the Panera, then took a break for dinner and convo for about an hour and a half, then got back to it, writing til well past midnite. I was writing a lot about the 90's, riot grl, coming up, tribes, death, the duende, imagnation and it's doomed demise.

Read this post! Yes! Not so much for the Pumpkins myself, but damned if Friday I didn't spend an hour in urging longing wistfullness over the first Lolla, & Janes Addiction, 1991....

Writerly Things, Reflections: Eddie's Place, Crofton & Back in the Day

This man I loved greatly died in the winter when I was 19, about to be 20. It was January, something like the 18th or 19th when he went. I found out on Thanksgiving only two months before, his son Little Dave told tell me Kel, dad's got cancer. I was standing in the basement at mom's getting ready to leave for some kind of impromptu day after Turkey Day family thing like bowling or whatever somewhere in the county with one of the aunts or uncles and cousins. Little Dave showed up, walked down in to the basement with the weirdest smile on his face. You always remember where you are the moment news like that hits.

Eddie was Little Dave's dad, and he owned the pizza shop I grew up working in. The whole time my dad was living in Cali, and my mom and I were fighting like blood and daggers, and my dad and I not speaking unless we were hating and yelling, Ed was a Pop to me. Teasing me, hugging and smiling and also yelling and scaring the shiz out of us and keeping me right, best he could for us anyhow, keeping his look out.

A month later it was Christmas, I was at the community college, had just started waiting tables at a fancypants joint in downtown Annapolis cuz the GM from Jersey came down and fired me from Applebee's, which is what happens when you cuss out a customer. It was before gentrification and the uptown yuppy parts of Naptown weren't there yet, same like Baltimore and the Harbourside condos and three and four star restaurants--none of that was there, just projects and ghettos and old abandoned warehouses no "revitalization," yet.

I was trying to not touch drugs anymore because two things happened when I picked up: I was likely to spin out and go a little crazy, and simultaneously once I started I could not stop smoking or sniffing or popping or whatever else it was I had to do to keep using once I started, no matter what the hell was going on with my body and mind. So it was days before Christmas and I went to Eddie's house, with a poinsettia for him and a letter mapping it all out. What he meant to me.

It was the last time I ever saw him. When I left I smoked a joint and circled the Crofton Parkway, and all the Christmas lights clean and glowing, and how could all that be going on normal, all these everylive's, and Eddie's gonna be dead. My mind mindlessly looping I drove the backroads Underwood to St. Stevens and on and on and back and back and Eddie was gonna die you know when the cancer's got someone like that you can just tell and lemmee tell you, I was young still, and fucked up. About three weeks or so later I pulled in to the parking lot of the restaurant, Eddie's Place, for a Sat night shift because I'd volunteered to take shifts again when he got sick. And one of the teens that worked the kitchen like I did when I started a sub girl came running out and said, Did you hear? Eddie's dead.

I was mad at her because she didn't know him like I did and how could you just drop the news like this out here in the parking lot under the grey eyeless sky? She hadn't been there all those years. Soon Maura was there and Mark and I think maybe even Cuddy and Kristen, too, then Billy came up, and we all cried a lot and didn't know what to say it just all happened so quick, then Little Dave called me, and asked me to give a eulogy on behalf of all us, Ed's restaurant kids.

The day of the funeral, or memorial service which is more what it was, I had to miss the first day of my first creative writing class, ever. When I showed up on the second day my heart was locked heavy with grief and little did I know, my Prof Susan, soon to be my first writing mentor, assigned to me a key and essentially said, go ahead, unlock. Unload. We had to turn in a memoir at the end of the semester, an autobiography, responsible for a large part of our grade. The first page of mine was Ed's eulogy.

What stands most out to me that spring was this compelling energy, this literal river that felt real and loving and natural as gold and that I could feel, all the time, like a channel just moving along through me. All I had to do, my only job, was to show up in my boat and then be willing to go. I didn't even need an oar in hand.

I wrote like I'd never wrote before, every afternoon, sometimes starting at 11 in the morning when class got out and not stopping until well after mom had gone to bed. I wrote, and wrote and wrote. It was the easiest, and also hardest thing--when it got to the pain-parts, like wringing an already rung dishtowel sometimes--that I'd ever done. And it was easy, because it was so natural. I just showed up in my boat, like I said, and off I went.

Later, Susan wrote a recommendation letter to Washington College for me, and helped me prepare a selection of writing samples. By the fall of that year I'd moved to Chestertown--hellooooo Eastern Shore, and life of Acadamy, and Institution, again--and then well you know...Here I am and So it goes, so it goes....

That was 11 years ago and all I've ever wanted was that river again. A huge part of the power of that river is merely trust. Trusting the river, but you can only do this if you're strong enough to trust yourself, and your boat, too.

In Chestertown I got sober, and lost a lot of the gleam of who I am. The radical starry-eyed sassy warrior grl I'd always been. I let her go with sobriety because, like the first line of Ed's eulogy says, My name is Kelly, though most you of may know me as that crazy girl from Eddie's Place and funny as this was, it was also true. There's always been a stigma for me of crazy associated to life prior to getting clean because of, well, because of the plain and straight experiences of literally and totally losing my mind. Drug related psychosis and figuring out if it really was cuz I was mentally ill, and the long hard battle all that was back then.

Bit by bit, year by year, I've tried to rectify it. Time and distance and maturity account for a lot.

The Duende is scary because death and crazy are scary. And it is painful, because only the artist knows so intimately the mid-wifing required of creative growth. To have to confront these, to have to be willing to confront it if you want to be brave enough and strong enough to do the work you secretly think you're capable of. And is anything really worth that hurt?

This morning, I was lying in bed and thinking about trust. I thought, you lived like this once, in 98, and again in 02 for that teeny little bit of time til you shut it down becasue of shame. And then, why fight it, this pacing coursing energy you actually feel growing and growing these last weeks, why fight who you are? I started to get up, to come write more on my novel, and then my room, my living room with my bed in the corner so that my bedroom could actually be my writing space, stilled. I stilled, in a moment of discovery which I guess is just acceptance, again, on yet a deeper level.

Acceptance of self.

The gold channel, the river, there it was. There I was, in my boat, on its shore. A small little click of peace happened, or not a click, just more like a feather floating softly to land even less than breathlessly, on the ground. A quiet soft sweet motion of getting my feet wet. Of stepping in.

My river is back. My gold channel is here again, refound.

I've keep looking at my hands and I can't keep from crying these wonderful hot tears all morning long.

On Poems, & the Writing Nuts

My new pal Mike, this writer-buddy from here in Easton and self-proclaimed lover of running (Mike I had to edit that bc instead of writing running I originally wrote "funning"!), long-boarding and his kids and fam, who also is re-discovering his voice and source-creativity-power in motion of song and poetry and light, just wrote this post about the first poet that ever turned him on.

Sandburg. It's a great post read it. The poem he posted is a dream all charge charge gogogo.

Who was yours?

For me it was Emerson, tho, & as I should of paid attention to all the way back then, it was his prose/ethics that first stood out:

from Nature
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches....

I remember, sure as anything, the moment, dropping on to my desk my own handwrote wilted journal of softback poems with a soft thwush of its pages as it landed because my teacher, who had a funny long name I no longer remember, mentioned the Transcendental Eye. Holy hell I thought in wonder and looked at her dazed, mystical, like she'd just woken me from a dream and here I am surprised as I was to find that I was in reality. I never did my homework it was my junior year so her lesson was all new to me, my first AP class and mostly I was consumed with having gotten arrested over the weekend bc one of the upperclassmen girls in the class had ratted on me at the party after I left blowin up my spot. Yea it was me that left the seen of that hit and run. (It was a parked, empty car that I took the bumper off of, not some poor shmoe left to wail in the street...)

Here, here! this teacher telling about the Universalism's and Transcendentalism and for the first time, here, here is some work that gets my attention, here are some writers I can get my hands on and I want you to know I read him, and Thoreau that whole afternoon in the back of the locker room and later, instead of religion class with Ms. Bo.

Next of course it was Ginsberg and the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...which would come to me and come to me later as I taught in the jail and needed to show these young street savy black men how fierce, how true, how real Poetry could get it on. I still remember the ache and sizzle reading it aloud in that cold, dark and stale windowless room. The eyes and nods and caught breath, the looks on all their faces....

It was Snyder that helped me cross the threshold, tho. Now we're in college, I am clean, my brain for the first time harnessing and focusing and making real connections through and through. The Bath. I wrote a 10-page paper on it in three hours flat and it was the only A+ I ever got with not one mark or yea, but...feedback. It blew my mind, and my prof's, too. Read it. Read it out loud like Mooney taught me to do. Pay good attention to the comas, the indents, the natural pauses until the rhythm gets in to you, melds with you, the poem and you are it and become you, and bigger than you, too.

In other writerly news, I want you also to stop by Erika's post today for a little bit of communion. God, this girl. I totally feel her, remember nodding out behind the cash register at Play It Again Sam's my senior year of college because I was working on my first and only fiction novel and was up all night long three, four nights, whole weeks in a row. Coffee infusions and lots of cigarettes. Sitting up out of dead drenched sleep with lines charging through me head. I cant wait to see where she ends up....

Happy weekend, friends. It's sunny out here on the ol EC, again! O sunshine my true and hope-full friend.

Morning

The funny thing about wearing glasses? What do you do in the morning when you cant see to find them?

After three weeks at Easton today I am unpacked FINALLY and instead of the place looking like a confused whirl of clusterfludge it just looks like I need to clean up.

I've gotten up blogging two mornings in a row and wanted to again today in my window in front of the sun and grand magnolia tree.

Thought I'd put on my Itunes and when I turned the computer on Fisherman's Blues started

in my head. I hit scramble and guess what was the first song?

Aaaa, fabulous. So it shall be that kind of day...

RANT

We had a thunderstorm last night, a thunderstorm. I was walking home from this writer's gathering at a restaurant 2 blocks from here and the haze on the air was balmy--It's like Miami out here I shouted to the lady beneath the yellow street light walking towards the corner and her car, her name is Marty and she came the latest and was also a first-timer like me but showed up with a definite sweetness of self that settled right in. I was up late with the books and my own catalogs of catalogs of writing and then standing in the bathroom with the one low light on dim and the lace curtain started blowing then I heard the cackle of leaf-wind, and thunder, and rain.

Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.

It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...

And which is the Work that counts the most?

O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?

The Real Work.

I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.

Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.

click here

Happy Friday.

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....

list: random thoughts and change

1. i'm working A Lot these days it is fall semester re-enrollment time and all i do is get new students registered hola hola bienveindo or how are you welcome i'm going to test you but it's so i can help dont be scared. last week i passed my one year anniversary at this job.
2. bob dylan keeps singing to me i feel a change coming on. in life, this is all there is, change. perenial as the breeze.
3. i haven't written anything all week, except for friday poetry day the day i spent in pjs with books all day because the night before the calling moved in me sudden like it does which is when i so love it the most. so thursday night after i worked late i came home all charged and pumped and just kept moving got tea climbed in to bed, in to soft, cool, happy bed my sweet little nest of me pillows and softness and my precious sheets, my arms full of books my heart with the illustrious light. this little poem that came out of all that meat i come to bed carrying arms full of you and i love you every one, we will make love, arms full of us, all night, in the morning i will prop up and revisit you with a smile And how good that felt to wake up and do just that, and it's only a few days later but i haven't been writing or on the net at all, so i had to come here, and just let some of it download out.
4. it is fall out, how i love to lie still in the quiet air in the morning. i got home tonight and mat and pat or else ruth or the wacky neighbors to my other side were having a fire. o smoke smell that i love...sweet prayers that linger but go eventually above. and the air coming off the river is cool and with no balm. the peepers speak loud to the deep clear night and tomorrow is september's full moon. have you heard it, the first geese calls?
5. i want to blog about this, about passings, the earth walk, the time outside and our connections. i want to blog about my grlfriends and how they save my ass again and again. i want to blog about classism and seeing from the bottom up instead of the established and oft unquestioned view of the elite out, or down. i want to blog about memoirs and starting again and again and writing even though it makes your heart hurt. i want to blog about spiders and flowers and how that is the saddest part of fall when the flowers start to disappear. i want to blog about change and the difference one year can make, about last year this time and all that longing spent staring at the corn, hearing the paper stalks shake, seeing the fall sky spread, driving and driving the yellow backroads in the dry afternoons. how different it all is, how much has, and so of course how little has, changed. i want to blog about how i still cant believe and keep forgetting that i am 32.
6. the desiderata has been showing up again, and again, to me. it is so good, it's own magnificent prayer.
7. i'm taking a lot of new stuff on. creatively. it all lives in me and is always there, like air, even when i dont see it or cant remember it.
8. i'm tired of my job, there is no joy left in the chalky burnt ruin at the wick of me. the people that i work with i am posting pics of them to remember that before we are workers we are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, lovers, friends. they are shining stars.
9. i work hard. i try to do good work. we all do. and like me, we all let people down. we are all unique, and ascending, and all also so very much the same.