My quest has never been for beauty. Beauty is something people have intrinsically because they are people. Male or female. It is something you let yourself not something you seek out or develop.

My search has always been for strength. Why? Because it is not enough to be beautiful. Pretty things break. Not all breaking is bad. Not all breaking is good. I want to be strong enough but not too strong. That is something I can seek and develop.

I have been told all of my life that this is a man's pursuit. Women should be beautiful and men should be strong. Women should want to be beautiful. Is it possible that so many women want to be beautiful because they were treated as slightly lesser humans than men? I could never prove that. I have known that I am beautiful and it has brought as many problems as it ever has blessings. I want to be strong. More than that, I need to be strong. I have places that I want to get to and a lot of people telling me it cannot be done. Good places. Peaceful places. Far away places that lie across the valley of the shadow of death. And I am going (and have been going) because that is where I have been led and I cannot wait for other people to be strong for me.

Also, I cannot help but think that the world needs more beautiful men and less men who are only trying to prove that they are strong.

What if we were all beautiful and strong?

I think we know this. I think this is why we write books and have Bible studies about "real strength" and "real beauty". In every women's Bible study that has ever tried to teach me to be feminine and beautiful, we talk about real beauty not being fleeting, not being on the surface, not being how we look but how we think and act and... it all sounds like 'strong beauty' after awhile. Real beauty has to be rooted and lasting and loving. Have you ever trusted weak love? But if I say that I have been searching out strength... well, apparently I have forgotten that I am female rather than male. So I will use other words. I will say "patience" or "discipline" or "self-control" because those are gender neutral words and I am allowed those even if I am denied strength.

The problem with art is that it is a tentacly thing with so many arms. You think you grab one, and you may very well do that while you are creating. Somewhere, though, in the midst of your creating, 6 more tentacled arms have attached themselves to you each with a string of inspiration and direction, demanding you. Not your minutes or your hours, but you. All of you. Perhaps you will be allowed to eat. And they are not terribly polite and will not let you go on quietly with your life with a simple "Goodbye I hope we meet again, but I am quite busy today." Nope. A muse petitioned and provoked is rarely content to just go back to bed.

I should be ecstatic. But the fact is, I have 2 days, then the grind for 4 months and so many tentacles wrapped around me.

Word for today, tenebrous. I like that my browser thinks its not a word. I like having a larger vocabulary than my browser.

poetry like a game of scrabble.

I want to drink words that have aged like a fine wine.
     It has been awhile and I do not quite feel myself.
     But...how could I be anyone but me?
     Maybe if I could hear the world in another's words,
     I would find myself.

I want to slow down time and to stop wishing for the rewind.
     I keep missing things and I know it but I am helpless.
     Why is that the important things travel fastest?
     How is it that they feel heavier?
     Perhaps, to force us to drop what does not matter.

I want to hold the seconds tighter as if they could be mine.
     My arrogance tells me I would be a better clock keeper.
     ...As if that will fix my problems.
     Changing time will not teach me to use it well.
     Wisdom comes, it seems, from failing.

Overflowing.

I promise...
to do more seeing
and less talking.

There are too many words here.
Too many so as to take the place of Oxygen.
So let us look
because our eyes are not yet full.

Unofficial Title: [Something New This Way Comes]

I want to write
but it has been such a long time.
All of the words try to come out
ahead of each other.
As you can imagine,
this makes communication difficult.
Pretty soon, there is no message.
Just me breathing in so many words.
My lungs become jealous for Oxygen
--and that’s not fair because, well,
I need both.
And yet I get neither.
I guess I am out of practice.
I always forget how clumsy practice can be,
even for simplicities like breathing.
Breathe before you speak.
Or risk running before you can yet walk.

Almost.

I have files and files
and notebooks upon notebooks.
I also have scraps,
class notes
with less space in the margins
than in the paragraphs,
church bulletins,
and a host more of artistic shrapnel
from a mind that is ... dysfunctional.

However, my dysfunction is a special kind
because it looks so useful,
it looks like responsibility,
it looks like the right thing.
I hope I do not learn
to regret all the right things I do in my life
like I regret this.

When I have worn through my poetic dishonesty,
all of that 'shrapnel'
from all of my ideas and thoughts and wanderings
is not as much lately,
not as much as it used to be.
I guess that is success.
I think they call it focusing.
But I,

I feel like I am dying.

I did not think I heard voices
until they went silent
and there was only me
and my routine,
my checklist.

Today, all of my files,
each one of my folders,
and binders full of scraps
looks like a monument
to the ungrateful false god:
 'almost'.

It used to be
that when my imagination
had even the slightest drought,
I would throw up my hands,
throw in the towel
and wonder if I ever was an artist.
I am not so melodramatic now.

I have begun to define an artist,
myself and others,
by how they interact with the world,
how they see the walls and people around them.
Though, as of late
I have begun to wonder
if I have seen the world at all.
Or I am always just passing through?

I want to write something new
but I am old.
Old like the feeling that today
would be so much better
if I had never left my bed behind.
Old like the popping of joints
and the creaking of memories.
Old like the slowness
that makes the world wait for you

But not old enough for wisdom.
No, not old enough
for experience to mean something
more than weariness.
Not old enough yet for patience.

I would walk the world over
with worry
if it would make a difference.
But it does not
and so I do not,
most days anyway.

My almosts stay almost done,
and I begin to itch,
begin to burn
wondering if there will ever be more
or if this is it.
The loss of eyesight
at the end of a life
lived too fast.

wandering

I am taking a Spanish class.
I am finishing a Spanish class. On Wednesday.

Much better.

However, the final for this class requires me to tell about my life up until now. I have to fit my life into 8 photos and 10-12 minutes.  Admittedly, I only have to make sense of 21 years and yet... I am proud and ashamed to say they have not been an empty 21 years. It takes a good deal more time than 12 minutes to make sense of them. I am struggling because, the point is not to make sense but to use the past tense of Spanish. And because I have only just finished remembering that the way I remember things is gone. Where I come from exists in fragments and it would not matter how many times I rewrote my past and what adjustments I made. The past is always just fragments. This crisis is not unique to me.

But I want so badly for it to make sense to these near strangers. I like my life, all of it. It is the tangled knot of yarn and time and memories and people and other broken bits that may not look like much one apart from the other, but that maybe, just maybe, might add up to something all together.

All of this would not matter so much except that it feels like the most disrespectful thing I could do, this condensing of life and accepting that I will misrepresent a good amount of it. Not disrespectful to me, though I guess that is likely to be true as well, but to life itself. I think there is a certain amount of respect due to things just because they are alive and even more so a certain amount of respect due to life.

Living is tough sometimes and it takes a lot to hold on. But life, life is a tenacious thing with strong hands and maybe even claws that dig in deep into living, whatever living is made of, and do not let go until it is time.

I do not understand whatever pact Life and Time have made, but it is not one to take lightly. I see them, in my mind, shaking hands. And if I had the time and the ability, I would draw for you what that looks like to me. It is terrifying and beautiful and just about comforting but not quite there. I promise. You will have to take my word for it because words are all I have today.

I am constricted to 26 characters and a handful of punctuation. Twenty-six characters to explain to you that I am homesick and day dreaming and not altogether here because everything that I want to touch is not in the least bit real. Some of it was. Some of it may be... and a lot of it never has been and may just stay that way. And that may even be ok.

26 characters to communicate the sort of pictures that my mind sees which is tricky because my mind knows no language only picture after picture after picture. Today, my translator is broken, both of them. And so I say too much and draw and paint too little and never get the right thing out, never say what I meant, always wish I could take back what I said even when no one is hurt. It's still a waste of words to say anything other than what you mean. Anyway, I am lost and currently untranslatable. Don't expect me to make sense; and please, send my apologies to my Spanish class after I try to explain myself for 10 minutes and leave them to wade through my verbal debris.

A picture and a poem. 

what I have left

The walls are better at listening than you or I are
And I guess this is due to their immobility
And lack of lips and mouth and tongue to fill the air between us.
Their spatial awareness is superior to either of ours,
Like how many words it takes to fill the room
And tip the emotional scale,
until there is not Oxygen enough for after thoughts like human lungs.
I have never seen a wall's proverbial ears
but I suppose this is not their only secret.

----------yep. I wish I had more; but that's going to have to do for now.

there are no drugs for this

My past is being rewritten for me it seems, and not in the typical 'fell back in time and made different decisions' sense... if that is typical. It is a very different kind of being rewritten. People I know keep remembering things differently. Not anyone I live with in Portland. And not any one particular person. But I have had about three weeks of  people who either do not remember at all or who have totally rewritten a past that I shared with them.

It is a very ambiguous sense of loss, a very certain alone-ness, and very likely steps toward losing my own grip on reality. My past and my reaction to it have made me who I am. Memories are important if fleeting. Count how many times God tells the Israelites to remember, to teach their children, to take care not to forget. I am not unaware of how much my whole life has been built on the breath of God willing me to make it long after I am tired and do not want to try anymore. I do not want to forget a thing, good or bad or even ugly.

However, I am afraid these past few weeks have made me question if I truly remember my own life. There are enough people telling me that what I know is wrong or worthless, I feel I have lost all my anchors in the past. It brings about great existential questions like, "If my remembered past is remembered wrong, am I still who I think I am?" and then "Should I be me or someone else?".

The answers may seem obvious to the reader. I however, have had a heck of a time trying to even match words to the feeling and now that I have perhaps, I hope, the answers will feel obvious and real. But the truth is, I still feel the weight of those questions and others wearing me down inside much more strongly than I feel their counterparts. This wont be forever, I hope; but if I am extra exhausted in these coming days, it is because I am trying so hard to remember history that no one else wants to and I do not always remember the value of.

I have tried to see 
the world through your eyes;
but they are closed.
There is nothing there.
If I could but see the pictures
painted on your sleeping eyelids,
maybe I could understand.


Tell me,
could you wake if you wanted to?
Your sleeper's life must be so beautiful
to have held you asleep for so long.
So much more beautiful 
than your memories of this waking life.


You told me once that you
no longer remembered
anything but your somnambulance 
and I wept.
I cried the tears you could not.
I cried until the clouds above 
were tired of my rain.


I wept because you will never know 
the color of my sky
and I do not quite remember 
the color of your eyes.
I imagine them to be the same though,
your eyes and my sky,
the one forgotten by the other
and yet the same stardust and storm.


I wish I could see the world
and your own sky 
through your eyes,
sleepy as they may be.
But there is one problem.
I am wide awake.

You steal gravity out from beneath me,
Let it slip down my quickly swallowing throat
And ask me to speak.
But my words have too much added weight...
Instead of flowing up and out of me,
They fall and fall hard
Downwards.
Inwards.
Up and down have moved
And somehow my lungs or my heart or both
[I cannot quite tell which yet]
Have become the center
Of my known universe
Threatening to suck everything inside
Until the hungry desperation subsides
And I burst.

9 of 10

I learned how to build home on the topography of my father’s emotions between wandering the woods and chocolate chip cookie making. He was a man still working through the rubble of his own upbringing and so he brought me up in the crowded space between his own tears. I learned to read him the way sailor’s read the stars, the clouds, and the sea. I learned to sail him like he was the only ocean I could ever love. I tried to learn the words that could bring us both home.

He taught me everything I know about emotions and feeling. “Don’t bottle them up and stuff them in.” he’d say, “They’ll always find you because they are not the sort of things that fade unless you face them.” So while he told me not to keep them in, I resolved to be better than that. I chose, instead, to keep them always out.

It took years for me to figure out  that short cuts are just longer ways to the same place for those who want to put off confrontation until it hits you from behind, knocks the wind out of you, and demands your silent attention. It may be the shortest distance between two places; but there are no places or paths for lessons like love, forgiveness, and getting over yourself. Those are long roads you have to walk yourself. Do not skip a step or you may miss it altogether.

It took me even longer to realize that sometimes the act of sorrow is all you have to give. There are no wrong ways to feel, just wrong ways to cope with the feeling. Still I forget and so I say again, there are no wrong ways to feel.

I have now been brought up as far as anyone else can bring me. I do not always feel the things I know. And I do not always understand the things I feel. And yet, the longer I spend trying to feel truth and questioning the why’s and the how’s of feeling, the more I stand by that statement. There are no wrong ways to feel... but my emotions are often malnourished, ignorant, and a little disconnected.

The struggle is to bring all of me into agreement. The struggle is to learn my own coastlines, correct my compass, and learn to sail a new sea. The struggle is to connect and educate all of my emotions in the hope that the daughter I do not yet know if I will have will never have to try so hard to ride my waves, weather my storms, and bring me home.

4 of 10 [a little late in coming]

5:00am
My alarm awakes before me
--as is its habit.
It has no tact
Just that constant war cry,
Like an ambulance or squad car
All lit up with lungs yelling for a race
Or chase.

But the blankets...
They wrap around my limbs
Like stolen goods;
And sleep comes like a thief.
I am just a bystander
yet the alarm holds me
Always in the searchlight.

Hands in the air!
Reaching for the sky
--and my towel.
Apparently, I have aided and abetted
A criminal.
That...and I assaulted an officer of the law
As I hit snooze and, eventually,
OFF.

Now I am to be escorted
Downtown.
I stumble down the stairs as though drunk.
Breath tested for alcohol.
None found.
(But I should brush my teeth anyway.)
That will wait. No time.

I am hurried into a small room
With a bright light
And a loud fan
And told to strip.
A splash of warm water in my face
And a set of clean clothes later...

And I am a responsible citizen again:
Ready to contribute to society.

3 of 10

Tell me the secrets
That led to your falling.
Whisper the words
That first captured your heart .

Did they make you feel weightless?
Important?
Or Free?

Oh, Love, please tell me
What spell was spoken,
Which promise pronounced,
That ever could have made you leave?

Words are deceivers
--No, worse!
Words are mercenaries.

Love, have you not seen,
Words march for truth and guile alike
Without one helpful glance
To give you a clue?

Tell me the secrets.
Whisper the words.
Speak them aloud.

Hold them firmly besides truth.
See if they shrink and fold
Or grow bolder.
See if the fall was worth it.

2 of 10 (yet unedited. forgive the haste.)

I have always loved the stars.
When I was not yet 3 times
around our star, the sun,
my parents packed up the car
and the kid.
We drove from south to north,
sleeping under the stars in sleeping bags,
tarps and, occasionally, the Honda.
And I, not yet 3,
could not imagine a more beautiful ceiling
or a more comfortable bedroom.
I was already in love,
already lovesick,
already hopelessly in over my head.
I have never really recovered from that.
Perhaps, I gave too much too fast
to my first love.
Years bring growth and tears
or else growth brings tears and years.
I have never really figured it out.
I still love roads, and traveling,
And always the stars.
Some years since,
many more travels around our star,
I have lost much love,
Loved and lost,
and found yet more love.
But I have never lost the stars.

1 of 10

If I had a super power,
I think it would be something obscure
Like metaphor.

That is how I conquer my days anyway
--if you can call it conquering.

The secret is to never
EVER
look life in the eyes
but never look away.

Always call it by name
as if you know it
and all of its tricks.

I have made up so many names
for the faces life has made at me
but they keep working.

Names,
they soften the edges.

Metaphors,
they sound like names.

The tricks I play
as I spin the only language I know
are the only defense I have,
the only barrier between me and powerlessness.

I do not have to grow up
And I know it.
But I cannot keep the world young.

That, I realize, is what I really want.
It is a tragic case of miscommunication
Between cause and effect.

Digging in my heels will only make me
Terribly alone
--and covered in dirt.

Life is not ever one single thing,
That's just how our memory records it,
Editted and glamorized.

Instead, it is the quiet pounding
Of a thousand hearts
Headed hopefully home.

And every one of those hearts
Spins ever onward
At full tilt with our globe

As we race ever and always
Around the only star
That gets to rule and reign time itself.

We can stop all of the clocks
And break all of the alarms
But the world will never stay young.

Brilliant Archimedes wrote,
"Give me a place to stand,
And I will move the Earth."

But that is not the problem, is it?
Try to hold this Earth
Stationary.

Try to keep her still.
Yes, unwind all of the watches
And let us together lose track of time.

But neither you nor I can stop it.
And we will never be free
So long as we spin.

So shake the Earth from orbit,
If you can find a place
To stand so far away from home.

Or better yet,
Let us sail
Straight into the sun.

Let us make it explode
With all of the star light and wonder
Held in our own aging eyes.

There, in the dark of newly emptied space,
We will finally be free of time and change;
But we will also be left with no where to go.

in an effort to distract myself, i bring you: the past.

She stands there like sad poetry gracing pastel pages,
ill-fitted but never wrong.

If you look at her side-ways,
her smile could be a frown.

Doorway open.
Sun streaking perfect, amber light.
Imperfect flies buzz at screened-in windows
as if to make you aware,
there are still worlds out there;
and they know nothing of her sad laughing eyes
and her big, sarcastic lips.

She is less sure than you
that there are differences
between your world and hers.

Some would say
to let the poetry be.
What is ethereal cannot
be understood.

Some would say.

Some always
always
have to say

something.

But as the sun wraps layers of warmth
around your shoulders,
as that perfect amber light
contrasts those imperfect flies,
as you contemplate the poetic differences
of tragedies and comedies
etched across skin,
there is prose that beckons understanding.

There is poetry in human living.

She has it all in her own subtle way.
Those who would say to let her be
have never met her, right?

When you begin to hope to understand,
her world comes crashing in.
Violent, living poetry
without a shade of gray,
her polarized planet stopped spinning
a long time ago.

She stands there
and when you are done reading her,
you smile.

There is poetry in human living.
And it is best when you understand
but understand without division.

There is nothing beautiful about
dismembered worlds yanked from orbit,
dissected lives taken out of context.

And those who always have to say
are only half right.
They read only their own poetry.

 08.03.09 3:24pm

One of my favorite places to just be at: Avalanche Gorge.

I know I hurt you every time I ask the impossible. I know that you would do it too. That is, if it weren’t... “the impossible.” But I cannot seem to tie back the words with knots or ropes or chains or weights heavy enough and strong enough to keep them from charging out and asking again.

It is hope.

It is foolishness.

It is blindness and I love it;

because seeing how far away you really are is not worth the weight that it brings. And so I love blindness. Because I can pretend that you are right here; and that when I ask you to come, you can.

It is selfishness too.

To hurt you so that I hurt less.
To shut my eyes and speak words that make you open yours that much wider.
To make you the one with the bad news and reality riding on your back for you to deliver...because I chose to forget. I am hoping for a day when we can both shirk responsibility and reality, cross the distance, and forget the gap was ever there. I keep hoping even though I know it to be the most selfish, foolish blindness.

But I love it.

Perhaps, forgive me, more than I love you.

Because, you see, I have to think that if I really loved you more than I loved the idea of you here, I would find a way to swallow those poison words instead of feeding them to you. But I do not. I am trying though, to learn.

And that has got to count for something, right? I mean, it is hard and unwieldy and I do not like it. I think that that is life though; and if the rumors are true, you and I, dear are alive and in this thing called life for awhile. If you could, be patient with me while I learn to love you more than my blindness.

leftovers

These are exactly as labeled: leftovers. thoughts. emotions. ideas. From the last month or more. Mostly mine, I think. Finally grown up and finished, I think. Ah, I lied. The first one ends too abruptly and I know it, but this is my temporary cop out. (and now it has been editted again...)



Here I am stuck again
With eyes so dry
They make the desert weep.

It is not that I do not want to release
And feel the salt water oceans pour down over me,
Just that I do not quite remember how to swim.

At first,
I was waiting
Until I felt safe enough.

But I forgot
who it is
who makes me safe.

And I forgot what a fickle thing
Security can be
to chase.

How do you end a drought
you requested, demanded, created?

How can salt water
possibly make an oasis
of any desert much less me?

Shall I grow
myself a salt garden
with glistening roses and petunias?

But how?
Especially when it feels like
everything that will be watered

must die again.
So I wait
to grow my sparkling garden.

And say always, "tomorrow".

-----------------------------------------------------

I have read about people who have woken up to confront change staring toe to toe with them without warning. And it really does happen like that sometimes. You go to sleep and a strange wind creeps in through all the cracks and takes away the familiar. The more often it happens, the more familiar the feeling is even in its unarguable foreignness. In a way, the more you know this wind, the more foreign you yourself have become.

So when the air greeted me with the first auntumn kiss I had been given in more than a few months, I knew there was more afoot and overhead than cool weather and geese flying south. Fall was coming, sure, or was already here. But it came with a mission: to sweep away the past and pack it away.

Summer was a memory. That season was over. It was being uprooted and thrown out; and not just summer weather, but the life we lived and the people we were then. Fall had crept in and wrapped its fingers, arms, and heart around my fingers, my arms, and my heart.

It is a good thing that change never asks permission. I never would have grown the way I have, to appreciate it and even to love it. As it is, Change just comes, shakes the world, and lies down for a bit--only to fade when the requisite newness and pedantic instability wear off. That is what I wait for, the new normal. Let North settle northerly and let gravity find the ground. Then we who are left can build.

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.