done?

tell me of your coming and your going
tell me of your wishing and your passing
tell me of it all

sing me a song
or tell me a story

please, take my heart in hand
just fill my senses to overflowing
the way clearest dark takes up the stars

and moves aside
to let them puncture timid, trembling night.

yes, tell me
and when you finish,
fill the rest with ineffable silence.

Things That Rattle

For the week, I am staying at my aunt's house in Arizona. Yay, desert! And being spoiled. It's a huge house that really does feel familiar enough to be home. I spent many family reunions exploring it and so it is a good place for some mind/body reconnection and reordering.

So I am trying to figure out how to write again, how to pray again, how to read one book at a time, how to lay enough of life down to let my body unclench, and how to draw what my mind sees and feels. In short, exploring the limits of discipline and focus. That video keeps haunting me. I makes me think. About a lot of things. But it also brings me back again and again to this woman in a pink dress that I saw on 82nd the other night with the hot dogs and stories. I am 96% sure she was a prostituted woman. I wanted so badly to go and talk to her, but she was preoccupied and I was a coward.

It's not a direct leap in my thoughts, but it does not take much to make me think of her. I think I have a window I will paint her on amidst...something else. For that, I will have to learn how to paint people. And I need to buy pink paint as I do not currently have any. This could be awhile.

Not to mention, I am trying to learn how to paint deep dark storm clouds and red kites (though I don't have anymore red paint)... and yes. Good things.

Also, I want a tattoo. So I've been researching that. Something about stars and compasses. And it will say "love is enough." Oh yes, vacation. So many things that have been rattling in the back of my brain can finally be heard and attended too.

Oh, and one more thing: I'm going through some of my old high school photography (2006/2007) and I found a few favorites that I mind as well share.

What to do, what to do?

The world feels awfully big today. Body hurts. Soul hurts. Soul hurts for all the hurting souls. Big. Heavy. World.

I spent last night talking to (primarily) homeless people with a fantastic group that exchanges a hot dog for a story. Any story. Preferably, true, but they will listen regardless. It is amazing the secrets that people will tell. Many of them like to start at the beginning and tell us how they got to where they are. Now, the human condition is all I can see and hear and feel. Too many ladies walking the same streets over and over. Too many men medicating. Too many people without hope and direction and any idea that it doesn't have to be this way. So many lonely, lonely people.

As usual, there is no easy solution or cure for the human condition; and it is this weight that is going to spare my bit of virtual space from more philosophizing about home and context as I get ready to head to Montana for a spell.

and we come back to the human condition, since I cannot escape. I went to a small time poetry slam downtown a week or two ago. It was fascinating. I am convinced I will never find more exquisite people watching if I search over and through half the globe.

I swear, nobody feels comfortable until they are the most outrageous form of weird here. You would think that abnormal people would feel at home in such a crowd, but I think they felt like they've been displaced, one-upped, and turned out. It is not a gathering of idiosyncrasies but a parade that somehow became a pageant of sorts. Oh, Portland. Competitive over quirks. Brazen and bold but not yet confidant. Everybody has to keep moving before you see too much of them.

And the poetry. Oh yes. I was surprised to find two categories: sex and questions. Sex, sure. It's Portland. Questions. Really? But it is the questioning and the uncertainty and the doubts and the... lost feeling that everyone connects with, writes about, shares in. I guess. And words are apparently the answers. The very words that may or may not have any meaning to begin with are the tools that the slammers go about looking for answers.

And I get it. Of course the poets will go to their art, their trade, their comfort for the answers. But I don't get how time after time words themselves were said to be the answers. Go no further. Are words it? Is there a language so universal that it actually fills the holes that beg questions of honesty? Have I been making all of my life entirely too complicated? I need to search the words themselves for my answers. Truly, I am lost here.

Perhaps, it is the feeling of not knowing that is terrifying. If you can describe it, then you have nothing to fear. If you can tack words to it, stuff it full... If you find the right words... If the words fit and fall and paint a picture bright enough... the terrifying unknown becomes familiar and is tamed. Then the feeling of falling finally goes away. Maybe. Ug. I wish. But it will take more than words to fill the heart of man, to make it knowable, and to give us hope.

Our emotions and our fear keep us honest enough to keep looking... but I do not like them today. I want to bind up the hurt and the hopelessness and carry it to the sun. Maybe that is a fire hot enough to consume them.

Trust is a pie
that you fill with the best of yourself
until it cannot hold anymore.

Then you bake it
so that all of the flavors
Bleed and blend;
And you have no hope of ever recovering
one single ingredient from another.

It is a pie

you leave in the window of summer,
filling your mind with either
Anxiety or excitement
because you know what is coming.

(And you do know exactly what is coming.)

It is hard to determine precisely
where the greatest point
of vulnerability lies.

From mixing bowl to oven,
from oven to open window,
or from window to knife blade.
A quality pie is never quite safe,
almost, and not really, but never truly or completely safe.

Sweet or savory.
Rich like the silt of the rivers
Or eggs whipped light
like clouds run away from home.
Trust is a pie

One made for you and I
to share with one condition.
We will never be quite truly, completely safe.