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.

Coby? Koby? Colby? ...

Coby was still drunk when we met him. We may have woken him up as we stood by the car talking about lunch and passing off the responsibility to make decisions and plans. He had spent the night in a doorway not far from our church, passed out. He was strangely pleasant, though a bit bewildered by the fact that someone had stolen his shoes. I understood then that he had not been homeless in Portland for long.

We have so many homeless people and the competition between them only increases in the dry (drier) summers when the more transient population comes in and passes through. It is worse here than in a lot of cities I think. More than that, in the two years I have been here, the corners and bridges seem to be filling up steadily with an increasing population. Portland is simultaneously an easy city to be homeless in and a difficult one.

It is true more often than not what they teach you if you volunteer with homeless people for long, "everyone is from somewhere else." And everyone almost always is. It is part of the process. And so I have a habit of asking where they are from. He said Seattle. In fact, this was his first night in Portland. And someone stole his shoes. He said he had never walked outside without shoes before and that it hurt. (I didn't know what to do with that...but I hate wearing shoes. It is a luxury I have though to take my shoes off and know that they will still be in my closet when I decide I need them.) We found him some water in the church and asked around for some shoes. No luck. Nobody was even the right size.

Eventually we decided to drive Kolby to the Rescue Mission to look for shoes and to get him connected. Hopefully, to get him into a recovery program...but he would have to want it. And I am not sure he did. If my hasty judgments were correct, he was chronically homeless and chronically in and out of prison with a host of prison tattoos to show. I wonder how it all started. And I wonder if he even knows how it started. But that is not the point.

Colby wasn't shy or reserved like so many people tend to be. There was no way Betty would have ever gotten in my car, especially since there were so many of us when I met her. And it's not just her, there is a common thread of mistrust among people who are reduced to hourly survival. Admittedly, Koby was less than sober, but still. It surprised me.

So I wonder. I wonder why he let us take him anywhere. And I wonder if he really wanted help or if he just wanted us to feel good so he could go live his own form of life. I wonder if he was puzzled by us or if he had met us church people before and knew exactly what he had to do to make us feel like we may had made a difference so we could continue on to home and lunch and all of the constructs of a life that either he has no appreciation for or which had no appreciation for him at some pivotal point. School. Work. Bills. Family. Friends. Dinner. Get stuff. Get rid of stuff.

I cannot help but wonder if all of my intentions were misread for naivety, which would be true in part. (I have more curiosity and enthusiasm than I do experience.) Or if there was no reading into things at all and he just took things as they came. I want so badly to know, though, how it all looked through his blurry eyes.

what i see today

that haunting feeling

I have a confession. It is one of those confessions...you know, the kind you promise yourself for years will never come from your lips. Not while you are living. Not even after. Other people will make this confession. They don't know better, poor souls. But you, you see what is coming and dodge it lightning quick because you can change what is coming and you can choose to never ever need to say that.

Are you ready? Here it is:

I have become my parents. At a very young age at that. I am not married. I have no kids. I haven't even found a real job. But I see it. Creeping out through my expressions, mannerisms, and choices.

I laugh like my mom? I drive like my dad? I cook like they both taught me. I sweep like my stepmom? I do my dishes like my stepdad always insisted? And so many more things. I give advice and their words fall out. When did that happen? It is the phrases I choose and the things I care about. Today, this realization came upon me en force as I walked through the grocery store with my legs feeling wobbly because I had just gotten off my bike. Though I was wearing Teva sandals, I could close my eyes and imagine my dad's bike shoes clack clack clacking. (My own shoes made just a similar enough noise.) Just like they did every summer of my memory until this one. Just like they do this summer without me to hear. Some things never change.

None of these things are bad. It is just weird. It isn't like I set out to avoid picking up my parent's traits, just that I thought I was immune because they were all so different from each other. But no. There they are, staring at me in whatever metaphorical mirror I look. Today is the day that I have to admit, I am their daughter. So many of the things I made fun of them for fall from my limbs and emerge in my expressions. Oops?

I feel fine as long as I am walking.

Forward of a kind, any kind,

Is best.

But when I stop

I itch and stir

And scrape and scratch

To start again.

To the borders!

To the very edges!

Right up to the horizon

And into the sun.

If there is no one to follow

I will be fine

Just let me go.

If no one comes

I will hardly notice

Just let me lead

--Even a march of one.

Because as long as I am walking

I am not here.

Here or there.

Both are places

Of static and station.

We who are always leaving

Hold neither.

And neither will ever hold us.

Move and breathe.

Walk and keep on walking.

Walking. Walking. Fading.

It's never really DARK in Portland.

This is it.
It is the this

That has always been coming

And now is here.

I like it

And I hate it.

This is what I wanted

And this is not it at all.

Funny what happens

When this

Is just an it

Without

Context.