I’ve built myself a closet. I didn’t really notice… I just, sort of, found myself here. Sitting on the floor and looking at the walls. They are painted nicely, the way that I would imagine the inside of my world would be painted. When I look down at my hands… they aren’t there.
Jealousy is hot red lava in my throat. There must be another way, a flip side to competition, some harmony that only love can build and nourish.
For, where I used to hide in the security of another, I have found my hope. A seed of a larger dream. Lines that move like I do, watery, wet, stream. Refreshing. Cooling lava. Making stone and steam.
Jealousy must be what kept me small. Afraid to leave the warmth of a hearth in winter, afraid to travel for fear that my space would be filled if I were gone.
I am choosing to move without a map’s direction, to learn the whispers of the stars, to trust the creatures of the forest and their offers to house me. I am learning to find space that holds me as I dance.
And I am afraid, for each step of my foot breaks what was untouched, snapping twigs beneath perfect crystals of water, bending beneath my weight.
I am afraid but I move and I pray that my steps are not ever causing harm but rather showing a way, not the only way, but my way. So that all who cross paths with me might say, “Look. Look how far you’ve traveled and how safe you remain.” And when the snow melts and Spring begins again, I pray that my path unfolds before me in blossoms whose colors call me by name.
When I was waiting for Santa Claus – the night had never been longer
When I was stranded in Europe with no where to go, no phone, no map, no money and no words in their language and the people on the streets had it so much rougher than I and the man I was with couldn’t protect me and the clock never moved and time was not my friend and the ground was hard and my body cold and the sky was dropping rain that hung in the air and I was so hungry and thirtsy that each breath begged to drink it and the men in bars laughed as they walked to their cars at bar close and the one hit the other over the head with a golf club and there was so much blood and the ambulance took 45 minutes to come and the woman begging for a light had orange juice oozing from her bandaged arm as she reached toward me and the only one sober was lying but told the true stories of how the others became stranded in the night with his few words of English and only inches of personal space and spit that flew from between his two rotted front teeth and the black man danced in the street to his mp3 player and they said he’d come from Africa and couldn’t get home and no one had comfort and we all felt alone, the night had never been longer.
When we left the hostel in the forest at 4am to walk eight miles to make the train on time and the man who just spoke Spanish cackled as he took our room key back and said with wide eyes, “good luck”, as if he knew that luck was not enough to make it out alive and the trees all seemed as if they could house a predator and we had no weapons but pepper spray and a can in a sock and the women at the exit by the part that was the zoo were dressed in hardly anything and leaned into the windows of the cars they rode away in as they negotiated terms in words I didn’t know and my legs burned and burned and burned and I couldn’t stop and I wasn’t safe… the night had never been longer. The walk had never been longer.
When I tossed and turned in his bed, anxiety animating my legs and I knew, KNEW, something wasn’t right with us but I didn’t know my worth and I didn’t know love so I didn’t know what and at 4am I finally left and the giant snowflakes were orange in the light of the campus street lamps and I felt comfort as they melted on my face but I felt afraid as I walked quickly toward my car for fear of being taken but in truth he was the only one who ever took me without permission… the night had never been longer. The winter had never been longer.
When my nipples were bruised and bleeding and she would only sleep in my arms and I sat up in the bed and read the sign on the door a hundred times and I was hungry but couldn’t move and I had to pee but couldn’t move and everything hurt but everything was sweet and I was sweating through my sheets which no one told me would happen and her father was asleep because he didn’t have the milk and I was waiting for her inevitable stirring and fearing that her cry would mean I waited to long to meet her needs and was an imposter not a mother but a failure and a fraud and my mind played out scenarios where water bottles accidentally fell off ledges and crushed her head and I was so, so tired… the night had never been longer.
I wrote a poem while I was in Europe about the cruelty of time and how, still, I also trusted it to save me. I wrote in my daughter’s baby book that I prayed time wouldn’t take her from me. I wrote in my son’s that time was passing too fast.
I’m not sure if it was time that found me alive or nursed me back to health but it was time that brought me through all of those nights. I’ve almost forgotten them.
I think that it’s time.
I think I am time.
The spring is here but it won’t last,
It will fold into heat
And heat will fall into wind and leaves will rustle and break
And snow will bend the limbs… bend my limbs so far that I think I’ll break but I don’t and then…
Its spring again
But it never lasts
And I’m only ever thinking of how quickly the cold will come and swallow me up again
And in those dark days as I dream of the flowers bursting and the birds singing through and beyond the sunset
I think too of how the Spring won’t last and Summer won’t last and Autumn won’t last
And in thought… Winter always seems to be where I land…
and… tonight I’d really love to just be where I am.
Sometimes I’m afraid that if there’s not somebody with me I’m going to fall inside myself.
and I don’t know what’s in there…
so, I’m not sure if it’s safe to go in alone.
But… I’m not sure if it’s safe to go in at all,
so I don’t want to bring you.
I don’t want to fall and have you jump to save me
I don’t want that at all.
I just want to feel… different, better, somehow.
Somtimes I feel like “oops, I’ve fallen in” and I’m deep and I can’t swim because I’m disoriented and up and down are the same place and every mirror is the same face,
but I don’t recognize her at all.
I am of the Earth.
It is right for me to roam her belly
like my nurslings’ hands,
who soften all my scars.
I want my therapist to like me…
so i better not tell her where i come from. how i got here. why im here – in this chair – in her office.
after all, she’s not in mine…
I want my therapist to think im perfect,
maybe, then, I will be worthy of connection.
until then… fake it till you make it… eh?
I hope that no one sees my flaws… i hope nobody prays for me.
A metaphor for perfect… must be calibrating consciousness so that nobody sees me, as close to invisble as i can come is what i must be, if im to make it out the bottom and rise to the top from the slums of drudgery, slavery and mastery and pastor eatin’ Mickey D’s and preaching how a person must treat one of the casualties of hunger and greed, the fuel for the property tax increase the mule for the walker who passes these atrocities without sighting nothin’, without seeing nothin’, without feelin’ nothin’. Who are these folks that breath jokes and some toke and some sober and some who’s lives are already over and some who find time in a corona and some who like fizzy soda and some who don’t drink anything the preacher feeds – some who don’t look innocence in the face without a sneeze, a reboot, a tease, a future a plea for honest consciousness to rise above the drudgery – what’s this comin up under me? I’m shocked to blossoms and flowers and green leaves… what the fuck is Spring after a winter like a thousand years of pain, famine and disease… tell me how to understand the recent train of happenings – magic making, tappin’ in – tell me what the fuck is HAPPENIN’! That’s a command not a stutterin’, rumbling earth quake from the ponderin’, mind to go out wonderin’, mine to go out wanderin’ i might explore it then, new terrain and it all smells like fresh friends, new beginnings with no ends.
I’m wondering;
what instrument plays me?
with all of my infinite, perfect, harmonics.
What instrument calls me home when this body falls and life travels on?
It surely is not an instrument I’ve encountered here with strings or wood or metal
But I must know it – for it plays me now.
Perhaps it’s a star.
God, Thank You For Freezing Time For Me
See, when I asked, I didn’t know that you already knew what I wanted
And I didn’t know we’d already carved the path and run water down it filled with little wooden boats to see which could float the way and which would capsize far too soon
I didn’t know you were watching or that you knew who I am
Farsighted… I recoiled in my pain, fearing that my dreams would gestate so long that I reabsorbed them
So long that I’d fall at the feet of someone else’s vision and repeat the same mistakes agian and again and again
More pain, more fear, more pain, more fear, more pain, more fear more fear more fear
Until
Dawn. Day broke records in half, like those songs we were singing were never meant to last
And you sent birds a’perch my windowsill and sent them tunes, new tunes, to sing me as I learned, again, to walk
And then run
And then climb
And now dance.
I feel honored to have met you so many times God. In absence and in space, in freedom and in joy, in pain and in pain and in pain…
And I thank you for not leaving me even when I thought that all was lost because now I’m finding that the path is far wider than I ever knew and other shoes on other feet are walking closely
I never knew I wanted connection so bad but now I do.
God, thank you for freezing time for me, for a while, so I could sleep.
(Written freestyle, “off the top”)