mine

Forgive me, but I'm about to be a girl.

I shaved my legs today, I put on a tiny, pretty, white nightie. It's the kind with lace, a ribbon, satin. It's the sort of thing that belongs in an old movie. It's too small to be worn by a grandmother, and somehow too nice, unsuitable for the more tawdry purposes of small silken underthings. I made my bed just to unmake it. I folded hospital corners into the sheets just so that my smooth toes could have the joy of rumpling them again. I let my hair down.

I read a cookbook, and something a entirely too girly to admit to publicly. I appreciated myself in the mirror and watched myself glow in the low lighting.

I felt pretty and spoiled wrapped in my new, perfectly white comforter in spite of the fact that it has no cover yet. I let myself feel the luxury of new sheets and ignored, for the moment, my bare white walls and my blinds open to the shrubberies behind my apartment, still sleepy with the naked late-winter midnight. I let myself be a silent pink cricket and rub my legs back and forth against each other just enjoying a pretended femininity implied by all the softness. I leaned into my brand new pillows and inspite of my revelry, was lonely.

I remembered a couple I saw a few years ago on a hiking trail in oregon. He was balding, and she had long braids and as many white hairs as black, as if her hair couldn't decide whether or not to match the age in her skin, or the youth in her eyes. They wore identical rain slickers, broken in rain proof shoes, and their hands were joined.

Each of their knuckles were swollen, as though time, and great love, had determined they must never let go, and so had manifested these fattened joints to lock them together, to jigsaw their wrinkles, one into the other, so that either hand alone was the lost piece of a two-part puzzle. The fit implied an intimacy which belied their long years together, and spoke not of one becoming accustomed to the other. There was no weariness in his eyes to complain of the sinking of her breasts.

I could imagine a future for myself much like theirs. A man to measure with me the trek of my breasts toward the curve of my aging hips. One who could measure with me every inch as they every so gradually fell. Humming to me in irony the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down." And celebrating each millimeter they crept toward decrepitude, because each fraction of a measurement, every hair-width down my chest was another day, another week. Each tiny evaporation of elasticity meant another Sunday morning, deep in bed, him leaned back aganst my chest, between my legs, reading the paper while I smiled at the constellations of liverspots beneath the ever thinning veil of hair atop his lovely head.

I imagined myself, rounder of the hip, fuller in the thighs, sleeping nights with him behind me, the curve around my dot, and we a formata of slowing metabolism, of hours shared, of a lengthening note of love that we would hold until both our breaths failed.

But he is not here. This night is not the night for that man whose hair will creep with every adventure we share from atop is head and sneak out the pores of his ears, his nose, his back. Tonight is not when we use my breasts as a measuring stick, to mark the growth of our time together.

Tonight I am lonely. But my chest is high and proud, and my hair is auburn and bends against shoulders who refuse to believe they might ever be anything but smooth. Tonight my prettiness and my lingerie lend themselves merely to the romanticism of my days and the calming of my tightly wound spirit. There is nothing lurid in it, nothing tawdry.

Some day, after a hundred thousand more adventures, after the faint beginnings of crows feet, or after some grand adventure, after nine thousand more trips to the coffee shop, and as many more poems as I can stand, after more broken bones, more broken hearts, and more happy lies, after a very long time of happy smooth vital limbs, after making love in ways only the very youthful can, there will be a time for measuring days in sinking breasts, and wedging wrinkles together, but not tonight.

I belong to myself and tonight, despite my loneliness, hope and my sweet bed have taken away all desire to share.

spit it out, junior.

Sometimes, like I dunno, every day since my last real blog entry, I get stuck on repeat. Too much happens and I overload and just shut down all the systems and put the overly verbose bullshit machine in neutral and try to wait things out.

This is a very bad idea. It's ignorance on my part really. I know what will happen. I have an autoimmune disease, and when I do the whole shut up lock down, lay down, hide out routine, it (for lack of a slightly less gangster term) straight trips out. I can't see and my pupils start to dilate at different times and because of all the weird scarring in my eyes, my irises start to look like ink blot tests. I look like I'm on ecstasy, and the people around me, because of my creepily shaped eyes, start to think they might be too. Then people start to get ugly and words begin to melt into them selves on the paper, as if the heat of everything I'm feeling has made literary fondue of everything I want to read. People always think I'm drunk, or high, or that I've been giving butterfly kisses to a leper.

Then, the dreams start. I am the queen of messed up dreams. Two nights ago, I had a dream that I was in an involuntary drag race with a 1965 Mustang driven by a pair of octogenarian lovebirds whose accelerator was somehow linked to mine. Everytime they sped up, I sped up. Everytime his oxygen tank fell on the floor and he slammed the brakes, my car would, with a disturbingly long lag, brake as well. All fun and grand, except for the fact that even my dreams understand the laws of physics. So, factoring in the braking lag and the weight of a my matching (but poorly repainted) STEEL deathtrap muscle car attempting to come to a dead stop from speeds that would make NASCAR widdle themselves, it was really only a matter of time before I found myself hopping out of a car mangled on the side of the road and apparently responsible for the deaths of an old couple, and, my somehow conscious real self was silently sleep raging at my dream self for being too preoccupied with glass slivers in my finger to mourn the fact that I had most definitely just killed people.

So, inevitably, when I get tired of my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend dream spitting on me, or the gustapo wanting to execute me for drunk driving, when I wasn't even in the car, I just boycott sleeping altogether. I find a stack of books, a giant mug of coffee, and sit about two inches from the page, picking my way through the static on each page, because I'm too blind to tell the difference between a cat and a towel.

This is why I write. This is why there is bad angsty poetry in red ball point pen in random storage facilities all over the country. This is why I have a blog. This is why my laptop and I are bestest of besties (yeah, I just said that.)

This is why I'm awake until four in the morning.

I know the cause and the cure.

The point is, that I just get clogged up. I know myself very well. I know that I can sort through just about anything if I can just get my brain to shut the hell up and focus on one single idea. But sometimes I just can't, and the hardest part is breaking the silence. I'm me. I always have the advice. I'm the girl who's seen too much, who says too much, who always has the words. But sometimes, I just don't know what to say. Sometimes I end up killing old people and writing bad blogs at 4:11 AM because not saying anything is just not working and I don't believe in the needless deaths of '65 Mustangs.

Quiet Me

something unusual, because it's almost valentine's day and i'll be needing this someday.


Quiet Me,

put your hand

on my Chest,

deep in the crevice

where my snow white bones converge.

the umbrella

the canopy,

keeping dry and warm,

my life coal heart,

the remnant ember

of a well-settled fire.

Place palm on solid sternum-palm

from which stoney stiff fingers stretch

and entwine again

'round my back,

knuckles a rolling mountain range,

from nape of neck

to curve of hip.

A circling safe

to protect my Core.
rest your hands atop those Hands

and take the Vow that they have took

to protect the tender places in me.

Recite with them that reticent prayer,

eyes veiled

beneath such gentle certain lashes

raised heavenward

away from all sweet chaos.

beg,

at the altar of all that is sacred

within this Hallowed Hollow:

a thrumming tomb,

a grateful grave
to all my Pretense.
Feel the heathen drumming

from within this living calcium cage

and let you not be
tepid

in your requiem,

but know the Passion
of that savage Percussionist

sounding out his feral palpitation.

Answer it,

with still lips

and sure eyes.
learn that Rhythm,
and Quiet Me.

phoenix?

This town is beautiful when it's gray. Even tear stained by the gods it has a freshness about it.

It rained my first three days back in Boise, and it rained again on what were supposed to be my last three. It's waiting to rain now. The entire contents beneath the lid of the world are breathless with waiting.

When I was a kid, I loved going to visit my Meme in Louisiana. In the summer time the rain would wait in the air, like it was playing hide and seek with you. It would crouch under the atoms of nitrogen; bury itself in the oxygen and wait. You'd hear it behind you and turn around: swear you could feel it on your shoulders. only to see that it had reached out of the night air to tap you on the shoulder and then retreated back into the living breeze. It would hang heavy and then crack open the sky and pour down from the very needles of the pine trees. The rain made each and every point, leaf, and stem a spigot. When we were kids we would wait until God made every vertex a firehose and head for the nearest hill. We'd wait for the water to start it's frantic downhill rush through the deep drainage ditches and all 8 inches of water was churning with our excitement, and we'd plop down and let the waters sweep us away. It was a dirty bathwater slide through the kudzu of the south; it was bliss.

The rain here is more timid.

On my flight here, I had a layover in Phoenix, and when my plane came down through the Arizona clouds, I found the city aglow. Below me it was spread out like a living thing, interstates, freeways and thoroughfares lit up along the edges like veins in an MRI and the taillights of the cars were red bloodcells flowing through them; pulsing houselights, neon signs reflecting off the glass, the metal all streaming vital luminescence, overflowing into the night sky. It went on forever, and as we came toward the center I could not see a place that was not Phoenix, alive flowing. I was overwhelmed by it's beauty, and by it's waste.

I saw so much light and energy. I saw a thousand cars running with maybe two people to each of them. I saw empty parking lots aflam with flourescent reassurance. It was an abomination, and a miracle. In the middle of the red dirt desert sprawled this gluttonous creature, alive, breathing, creating waste, destroying and making a hundred thousand million thoughts and products and messes and people. I was so deeply touched and I couldn't stand the thought of the plane lowering before I knew whether the city was the cancer or the cure. As the runway came up to meet us, I felt cheated. I needed to know whether or not I was horrified or awed.

It's not really raining anymore here. But the clouds are waiting. Hanging in the air like they have something to say. Like the moment right before a breakup or right before the first I love you. They are the policemen waiting on the doorstep to give you bad news. There is a holding out sort of feeling, like if honesty can be procrastinated long enough, the truth might change, but the water will come again before the afternoon is out. There is news in the air; a charge. The hairs on my body stand a little taller.

There is news of who I am becoming. Of this place and of me in it.

I feel the need to apologize to this place, the trees, the wet concrete and the earthworms pulling themselves across it. My guilt at all the things which I have broken is sour milk breaking across my senses, but I am aglow wityh possibility. I just can't figure out if I'm the miracle or the abomination. I want to dance a thousand unholy celebratory dances beneath the mournful drips of a slowly cheering sky. I look at my fingers and see the glowing pollutant of a wasteful and miraculous girl. I see the freeways in the blue veins of my arms and against the misty pallor of the day, my metabolism sets me to the flamegolden hot glowing of the million Phoenix streetlights, each cell a home for forgiveness, and hope. I am a submerged in the expense of a human life and am brought to my knees by my willingness to revel in it utterly.

I feel too many cheesy things beneath the baptism of this day. Loss and hope are together, conjoined in airy coitus; all sweat and joy, tension and release. There are no lines between what I have lost and what I will gain; they are entangled in the making of something new. The over-Phoenix night sky and the Louisiana deluge's are bright and red-faced with the tender creation of brand new things. It has all made me midnight salty skin and deep muscle tired like a child who couldn't stop her fiery dirty feet from dancing.

It is all coming together, and from here I know it will diverge again into strangeness and the chasign chaos of becoming who I am, but today, just for today, I feel the tenderness of the branches of my time here brushing hair and sweat from each other's faces. There is symmetry, and there is the electric waiting of the skies to tell my truth. For now that is enough.


P.S. I swear I don't always feel everything this intensely. i'm just creepy sometimes

i've got this feeling

This blog kind of sucks, but here goes.

I am breathless. Gasping. Every time i yawn I stop dead in my tracks and make myself do it again, just to feel my lungs stretch out, Just to feel the dirt, the skin, the life, settle in my lungs.There is simply not enough air. I want to breath in the atoms of every living thing; I want bigger lungs.

I have an irrational and complex love of everything. Tonight, I am touched by the scent of salsa, and the falsetto of Regina Spektor. I am brought to my knees by a picture of myself, a sunset, and hair dampened by a downpour only willing to relent to my wish for a peaceful goodbye. I have a ravenous love for the feeling of sheets agains my legs, on the first day I've shaven my legs in well, awhile.

This blog is about my way home. My way to myself and all that implies. Some days it feels like I've been gone a very long time. Some days, the thing I feel most vividly is the distance between myself and the girl who rations her openness like butter pats in the second world war.

December for me is typically a time of listening to the Counting Crows' "Long December" on repeat and analyzing and reanalyzing the reasons I have to believe that this year will be better than the last. But this year I didn't. I distanced myself even more thoroughly than I ever have from that deeply feeling mass of human intuition and reception, and refused, completely and utterly to analyze anything. I didn't want to be like all those other pitiful little messes who felt remorse, who wanted to change. I didn't want to associate myself even remotely with anything or anyone that felt.

I played, tittered, drank, debauched, and just generally spent the greater part of the last 3 months proving that I was just as capable of worldly callousness as any testosterone chugging pork rind of a man I met. Let me just tell you, it's been a quality couple of months. Grandma would be so proud.

None of this is easy to admit, I'm even blushing now, with no one in the room but my iTunes and the rapidly dissipating particles of the unadulterated joy I experienced tonight.

And then it happened. I was busy trying to be callous, and laugh away the truth, and I looked at that picture, heard that song, and smelled that smell. I felt the sheets against my legs, and the dam broke. The truth fell open in front of me like an old book. I love. I love the feeling of tea as it slides into my stomach and nests there like a sun swallowed; I love that I can breathe out it's warmth in gusts of flaring heat and fog my own glasses. I love laughing until my chest hurts and I can hardly hold myself up. Sometimes, when I'm feeling rebellious I love the roll of the word "fuck" as it bounces off my tongue. I love you. Really. I don't even care how well I know you, I probably love some piece of you.

I still love my first real boyfriend. He's happily dating someone else. He's a republican. And still, i love him for what he taught me, for dancing to the sound of crickets and the way he shook when he told me he loved me, because it was beautiful. I love it because it ended and I cried myself to sleep for months. I love him because I was in mourning for so long and because dear God, what's the real forever and always wrinkly and fat together kind like?

I love my mother and father because of all the times they broke me into a million little pieces and I learned to put myself back together, I love them breathlessly for the times they were doing the putting back together.

I love fingerpainting and the smell of garlic. I love batman.

But I reigned it in. I understand that this post is similar to the last, but humor me. I'm back in Boise this week. I'm in love. With the parts that hurt, with my shame, with my hope. I feel a lovely self-awareness and a ferocious desire to feel nothing but exactly what I feel and to know, truly what that means.

I made so many mistakes in this town. I broke so many hearts. I broke my own more times than I care to count. It's February 2nd. It took me 33 days, and I still don't have a real resolution, but I've got this feeling. I feel like every inch of me is stark-ass jiggle-nasty native villager naked to everything. Good thing I shaved my legs, huh?

P.S. I promise something a little less....hoaky tomorrow, I just couldn't sleep, and my lungs wouldn't get big enough.

feverpitch

I try to date like a man.

I can do nothing else in my life so manly as dating. Women are vulnerable, you see, needy. You can see right through us. Even the cheaters and the liars. It's in the way our bodies curve in or out. Love is like gravity for a woman, and we make satellites of the most tender parts of us. When in love we orbit, some in more obvious ways than others.

But men maintain a certain stoicism.
They are better liars. There hopes do not find a place within them to settle and magnetize towards their love. Something casual and dangerous lurks in the love of a man. It can pick and choose. There is no irrational chemical burn in their veins, no withstanding martyrdom.

So I try my best to date like a man.

I do not make myself transparent. I ignore phone calls. I hold myself in check. I do not squeal, I do not gush. I am careful. I can flirt and multitask as well as any man. I can go out at night, and know exactly which phone numbers I give out with be ones who might be kind, might be real. But mostly, I know they will text me the next day, with texts about "chillin soon" which will chill me with the surreality of it all. It is not possible that people are not hungry for each other, except in body. I know somehow it's not true.

But I see it. Eyes glazed and so far past pretense as to not even care if I hope. Eyes with intent and the desire to hunt. The ones that will say anything.

So I limit myself. I tell myself I can see right through all of it and suddenly, when I choose wrong, I am as shocked as a child who touched her fingers to the perfect orange flame. But I am a child in so many other ways. Once found, my vulnerability is naive and bottomless. I become a well of forgiveness, and unabashed tears flow freely if violated. Once penetrated, the core of me is sunburned skin, open wounds, and a toddlers trust, all in one easily trespassed package. I am a doll undone, filled with all the world's rot, and sewn shut again, with the loss inside me.

I am a cry at feverpitch, and I am lost. It's strange and rare. My pain is the blackest and most priceless of gems. I cannot keep it safe. And worse still, every day I'm growing new nerves, new loves, new ways to hurt. In each and every moment a millimeter of skin grows succeptible, even with all my trying.

So I try to date like a man. But I am a woman. And I am the soil that will not fallow. I am made a great arch and a great fool by the gravity of my love. And gravity is ever so strong.

"--He was once found on the Well-Regarded Rabbi's lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his index finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum to heel, and used his body to remember his body, and in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?" Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated.

And so I am bound, like the madman in the story, to everything that I believe. I have tied myself to myself in order to remember all the things that I must be. As a writer, I am naturally one of history's self-swaddled string things. I am bequeathed the duty and the desire to watch as people act, and commentate on the hasty race of minutes through the years. And as the years enter the pubescence of decades and matuure into eons, I take note, and in order that I might remember the beginning, I tie it to yesterday and string each today like plastic beads on my elastic memory. I have front row season tickets to the tournament of our humanity, while each and ever belligerent soul fights for his or her right to be the most impervious to their faults, and therefore the most fallible.

I have taken note, and kept notes since my bitten fingers found the poise of a pencil and I have built my ideas about the world from notebooks filled and overflowing. Slanting sidewalls of spiral notebooks, clothbound volumes half filled with sloppy ballpoint texts, evolving from bottom to top. A foundation of titled rhyming verse, in junk store ledgers, easing up into the free form poetry etched into floppy disk, then CD and nearing the top transparent walls electric with attempted blog prose, and the glowing Verdana font of Facebook notes.

All that I know has or will be housed in what I write, and in what I can't. In tying together the days, I've opened doors, eyes, hearts, and lives and inadvertently scared the living crap out of myself. It's always been about bearing witness; in speaking the unspeakable things all I have wanted was to connect those who thought they must be seperate. I started to get scared when I started to succeed.

And then there were more strings. To remember to be deep I ran a string in one ear and out the other and tied it round the back of my head: reigns for a mind whiche needs a strong lead to direct and maintain the trot of the romantic elite. Further and further I entrenched myself in expectation. I could not be shallow, I could not be untrue, I could not be uninspiring, and for Christ's sake...no more princess dress blogs! I needed to tell the truth and unburden myself, but with the delicacy of a face atop the shoulders which woud bear my load, suddenly the strings which made me remember myself were inummerable.

So there I was, up to my metaphorical scrotum in my fear of forgetting the days, the lessons, the rules, the hours, the minutes, the expectations. I managed to hogtie myself in it all.

Is this someone to trust with for a story? Is this someone to trust with your life? Am I, one of the madmen of the world, she who you should trust with the annals of your humanity?

Can I be trusted with all that I have seen, to do something real and bright and hopeful with it all? I am afraid of my own yes. But there it is, most ardently, yes. I can build a fortress unto the stars, stacked tale and life and leaf and instant upon verse and bat of eyelash, metaphors jointed and mortared with assonance piled and ornamented with lies more honest than a lovesick teenager's eyes. Ceilings vaulted with lofty attempted eloquence can make a place to take refuge against the harsh truths of the world.

I can do that. I can hem and haw and tie myself up, tooth to toe, and unravel myself again like a child 'round a maypole, and make right my hesitation. I can. I think.