How that's supposed to make me feel.

I am writing this week with loud music for part of it which I'm not used to being able to do.  So far, so good.  My Wednesday morning regular cancelled this morning and I had slept on the sofa because it would be easier to get up early.  I like mornings that start like this, right off the couch like it's still yesterday and all I have to do is go change and fold blankets.  Coffee will be ready by the time the screen is already open and gaping and that is a huge, weird turn-on.  And then I am sitting and then I am finger tapping and time is disappearing behind me like road under tires.  I don't get any of this.  And writing feels like I am almost to my shoulders in the hot spring muscle soft waters.  Every word I write I also see a dream splice, and it has been like this the last several days where I am walking in the middle of last night's dreamscape.  It is funky to weave my thesis in with all this.  My therapist's direction:  follow the soul of the work.

What in the good love of fuck?  I don't even know what that means either.  I have never been so frustrated and so at peace in my life.  I think of October 2011 living up north at the top of the state dirt redwood backroads and doing yoga under the green canopies.  And in a forward bend and stopping on a choke feeling of glee because, ohhh my god, this space here on my back deck I could see this.  Deep inside in places that always just felt like discontent, because that's yearning, I saw this land and this yoga here, that fog and that sun, the pine needle earth, these trees!  Holy god.  And that's what this is, yes.  This little hobbit house window looking out the canyon, the heater on the floor the music and the sun deck for reading in the late sun hours.  My god those moments in my past I remember now, misery so stuck inside cuz that I could see all this, too.

There's nothing worse, more whiney--than that.  When?

I was writing a long spondown of poetic compulsion bc damn it there is a man on the east coast who still has me a little stunned.  And what I was writing was sounding exactly like the song singing.  Which I'd never heard, it was Po'girl.  Mercy.  I saw them in Easton at the Night Cat two different times back when there was still a scene there.  I lived in the best ever apartment in Easton, with a wall length eight foot high book shelf and a bedroom I'd made my study for writing and meditation.  My bed was in the living room which made it fun when guests stayed on the couch.  I could sit on the roof at night there and look out over Goldsborough.  And smoke cigarettes bc that's what I do.

There is the deepest hollowed out space beneath me that says only one thing, oh my god how am I 37 already?  How?

It is the first time in a long time that I don't know how that's supposed to make me feel.

The silent prayer

The hobbit house is built in to the side of Laguna Canyon and for that reason at night with no heat it feels cozy and held by the earth herself.  I have a space heater Annie and Tony gave me when I first moved in and that's all it takes to stay warm.  With lots of soaking rain the soil is green and smells like life.  Even the morning mist-gray feels right in an atmosphere like this, one that sings Allliiiiive!

Damnit even if the Gods themselves gave me a paintbrush I couldn't of hand-created a life more exactly specific to what I love.  This I tell Serena to ensure her, this, this our hard fought independence, our always-there choice, to live. What Laguna Beach for us actually means.  She has done it every step of the way as I have and I admire her fiercely and devotedly for this.  We will always have this.  I laugh then and say because they did!  I took my brush right from the God's hands!  Said gimme that I will choose the life I live!  Serena laughs too, this our secret, what we treasure and hold dear in the other.

It has been a long road since she left the treehouse upstairs.  Life, which in living gives us what we need.  We are so blessed I also tell her, and yes, yes we are I know, she says back to me.  I feel a gulp in my heart and for us both feel-say the silent prayer.

I am always so wrought through with home and the ties that bind.  Spent two years studying the psyche of this, of these things, and am convinced more than ever of the continuum of earth, of how she uses her people to soul-speak for a place, and in this way keeps sacred the tides of the land.  There is so much life outside any door.  When I first got to California the best part was how new it was.  I vowed never ever to take you for granted Holy California and even though sometimes I start to, in the end I never do.  Or still haven't.  And that's what life is.  To keep waking up. Again.

I consider family, too.  Back east, here.  Derynne and Cam, the kids.  We buried her brother in what for her I know was a long whir of endless sad.  Pacifica family and blessing the sacred space for Eve and Kalen to wed.  Visiting with Atticus, seeing clients again, waiting on Jasmine to get back for school.  Through it all there are tacos at Feast, the hot counter in San Juan with the pounds of chilaquiles, the clerks at the market downtown who tell you they missed seeing you, there is mermaid beach and the other secret spots and burrito joints with surf boys covered in tattoos.  It is amazing how our tiny rounds from day to day connect us in, make life, see us through the daily passings of grocery trips and recycling and take-out Chinese food.  See us to the big ones. Death, marriage, birth, tears and laughter. The sighs in between where words can not fit.

So it life again.  I come back to you.  I let you in.

Upon the screen.

I want to speak with authority but maybe I'm wrong--though this is my third winter being here so I ought to, if it feels right, be able to believe my ability to judge the seasons of this place & speak the earth speak like I so often do.

This said, it is like springtime here, or how we learn spring by the tide of April back east.  I love it, the earth awakes, it rises my heart like a flock of doves sit beneath which maybe that's because it's true.  The buoyancy, the fat bird-singing songs infused in the ascending green.  I am not more than this:  the live song.

It is, and I hope that readers who read me one time before for the poetry, get this--a time of waking myths.  Activating our mythology is the charge of the day--and I mean this as base and re-rythmic as allowing your thoughts to settle in to your conscious choice of brand new words.  New stories.  I am writing, clearly, precisely, my own.  By being the words.  It has been so long.  I think, I see my Self, honor, bare witness seem to choke just a tidbit, and say Could it really?  Have been this long?  And more, Is it true I actually came out here--here California--on a hunt for them?  And yes, just there, the echo--yes that is true.  I did.

It HAS been that long.  And there the perplexity, Could it really be sure, true and simple as THIS?   And that is what's most devastating to say.  That when it's been since July of 2012 that you've had word activation you actually forget what it means.  You forgot what it is like--no, you forget that it's possible to cowrite song.  Aghast, even as I write this I stare at the screen--how is it possible to so unwittingly forget what it means to come back to my self?

I have no questions though…the years that ask, the years that answer…And so it is.  All answers.(Even though questions are how they seem, you forgot this though the double vision cross-eyed grace.)

Even sure as I see it finally, visited by my hands that place it up upon the screen.

I was gone fifteen days.

Not really sure what happened other than I slept eight hours last night, almost to the exact minute, and felt clean and clear waking up in my bed in the loft in the canyon.  In the California mythos of sunshine-wintertime.

I was gone fifteen days but the truth is it was way, way longer than that.  On Friday Uncle Tim, who is my godfather by the soul way, called in the morning.  It was Ocean Pines gray out which is its own special prison that keeps the winter folk away.  The thing is with sock-in like that marsh gasses keep the soil tender-moist and smelling green.  So we took a four mile tall tree walk on a path he tends for the Rec department and I cried those hot soul-cleanse tears that are meant only for God-ppl and wise women, which of course are the same thing.  Helped me to take serious the karma I have between me and my own god-kids, too.  Later I found out about Derynne's brother and couldn't see straight again.

So Konan came through winding us up at Cork Bar downtown which in a million different scenarios if I had to hand-pick that would be down towards 9 hundred ninety thousand on the list.  But here's the thing, the Wild proclamation:  you just never know you know?  We wound up late night in WOC and that there was the only place in the world I needed to be, kicking it w his real home grls and seeing myself in them in a way I haven't seen me in Way. Too. Long a time.

The next day I stayed in pajamas til 7 pm and watched the Red Tent and ate the soup broth I'd made/been making since the first night at home.  Witchy bitches make witchy brew.  We watched the Ravens rock Pitt like we all knew was coming.  WILD card that's Baltimore, that special Baltimore one-eyed medicine some mistake as bad (false-pride).

And that's what's up, tracking home, the special tendencies that run the soul of who you are cuz of the land peopled through of from-where-you-come.  If you can read and track this, good for you.  If you can't you need help dark-seeing which means between the lines.  Linguistics.  Can't be studied. Someone should tell Pacifica that.

Point is this all happened or started back the night I went to HB to meet Yasi and Konan started blowing me up--that's the thing about WILD, all cards eventually come a calling and that's the thing about one-eyed medicine.  It's your duty to rise up when the reminder comes: you CAN see.

So now Humboldt makes sense, the long 101 journey home again to the earth and the tides that rise.  I come living back to the canyon, no food in my hobbit dwelling just coffee and no phone charger to keep me tied to time and ties and all that hell.  I write these words and The Light comes on which is Erin Mac back there in Baldamore making her next moves saying wutsup.  She comes through as WILD does, like I useta say and always will, Poetry is my only religion.



That is what's up.

I know Who I am.   I need little else than that.

Prayers that all ppl get right. Or Wild.  Either or is the same.  Go listen to some good music if you're dead!

I'm going for a swim.

You can drink.

The part of me I landed on since even before Maryland I have pretended not to see but it's sitting here finally staring back at me.  This happens some days your one-eyed blindness comes a-reckoning.

There is fine gray rain-light in my back room at Ocean Pines.  The quiet truth is you can't go back again.  If you know me you know words flex in and out and taunt and haunt my head, you know fire propels and burns my guts and runs my legs and doesn't let me settle, you know the arrows of these things draw electric on my skin and you know the deep quiet places I like to disappear from it all into mellow trance and stare.  You also know there's a shine that transmutes everything and illumines the muscle of my heart and leads me and that most of all for this heartlight I will and do forsake all.

My father leaves for golf after coming back for a rain jacket.  It is near 60 out today.  My mother is on a plane to Mexico. Miles from here my cousins are in cozy nests each with their loves and this of course is the only thing that makes sense.  I try not to be jealous or misunderstand.  The first beach boy I ever loved has wrung me up and washed me out which is exactly what I came here to let him do.  All of it is past now Kel, can you be past it, too? HOME.  Where I stand it sits out like a soft grassy tump just above some fast moving blue waters.  They are crystal clear.  To write this makes me also see the Ocean City pier.  There is above it a sky that is soft and pink-yellow with the warmth of a season-worn sun.  The waters are tracking and quicker than they've been in a long time and yes, that's it.  I don't have to cross them, and that is what it is to stand here.  Because you can go back you can go back over and over and again to the many dark falls just behind you oh but to stand here, on the grassy tump with forested woods thick and deep just steps away from my feet--and so many cliff sides on the shore to the other side.  You also don't have to.  You also can just sit shoreside, and breathe.  You also can scoop handful.  You can drink girl, you can drink.  My god this thing will move you, you can let it, can stop the canvassing and cutting of jungle vines can stop all the bloody poison you keep ingesting in your veins.  You don't have to cross these waters again because there's no place else left to go. You can jump in, right here, and let the waters wash you through.

Or you can just stand, too.  Stand in this peace awhile, on this sturdy ground.  Appreciating the scenery.  The where you've been.