i was

"She thinks she can warn the stars." is one of my favorite lines from Anne Sexton's The Black Art.

december

its like christmas is kinda messin up my winter right now

new blades in the rain

Disappearing can be easier than you may imagine. Things are so wonderful it is like you are faking it. and you are, so its okay. Children getting shot in the street and in your careful boots and raincoat you walk home, 4blocks from chaos. We are changing inside finally, it took long enough. I am in disguise, I cut off my hair, I gained 30 pounds. They can't find me now, they cant feel me. I'm safe in the slums, no ghosts.
I found a bottle of pain pills in my bag. We went to drawing class and the model was so stunning. Familar in my hand, the pencil maybe... but no.... my movements were foreign.

skeleton key tattoo
an old friend mails me an early 80s broken alarm clock for xmas. It is like i can't stop laughing. We are all so imperfect.

I like night sky

“there was a star riding through clouds one night, and i said to the star, ‘consume me’.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

perhaps...

“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”

“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”

So these quotes are from Carlos Castaneda and even though he was full of shit in a lot of ways, especially when he got old and was kind of a dirty old man leading a cult and convincing chicks to die with him, i think that he had some pretty brilliant insight in his younger days even if it was brought on by peyote or whatever kind of astral projection power root his ass got a hold of.... i don't know about paths or whatever but we are certainly moving in some direction like it or not and well anyway it is something to think about bc I, for one, am both in terror and wonder of ...like, my own damn neighborhood....

what it takes

It feels so good to let go. Well, it is actually excruciating -  but it is like running, at some point in the pain, a euphoria from nowhere fills you up. The exhaustion accumulates in the realization that there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do and you know what you must do and then it sort of blanks out. white screen. And you have a lot of sweat and some self doubt still, but you know the worst part is over. and that you won't be the same no more. and you glide.

We walked like trees that had escaped the ground.

"Well, he hates it when I smoke, so this won't last long."
"That was an abrupt and devious move."
"I hate your handwriting." and "If you were someone else, this would be easier."

There is a certain color of December sky that causes instant depression the second my eyes hit it.


We walked to the river and the beach is now gone because the water rose up. The river covered the sand. The place had changed considerably and so had I.
 

I explained it to her, and she said, "Well, is that something you want to change?"
My brow crinkled and I paused. "I...I don't know..."
"Oh yes! Yes, honey it is. That is something you want to change" was her reply.

"On the other hand, some people are just no good at being earnest."

dirty streets

shadows and sand

through dirty glass, i don't want to get over it. Even if i could, i don't think i even want to.

 

and that is just how i feel right now.

The Swamp,the Stage and Me

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

– C.G. Jung

So then....

 

I got a bike, yo!!

this time

I'm waiting for a singing telegram that will never arrive. waiting on a text message that was never typed, a letter that was never written, a song that just stopped just 2 notes in. It is going to start playing again and i will embrace every off key chord that startles me out of my selfish shell. except i won't bc it won't.

Romantic love is bullshit in case you didn't know, but I am sure you did know. The clock started going all kinds of crazy and by the time i checked the second hand, the  numbers had all fallen off...the whirring melted it all running like yolks down my face. down to the garden in a sad little bathtub near the overgrown and unkempt basil.

It does that and then i can't think or draw or read or write or paint or be sober or alone or around anyone. She comes to see me with medicine to make it better and he drops off flowers, burgundy daisies, cheer up kid. I dont want to cheer up. I tie the flowers upside down to dry out but they slip from the ribbon and crash in slow petal dancing motion to the floor and i begin to cry. then tie them up again.

I get the beer we fought over and just decide to write about myself for the whole modern world that isn't looking to never read just like everyone does. it is a lot like holding a protest sign up inside your closet.

In the grand scheme of art my paintings are bad, but I put them up in the cafe anyway. A protest sign for you on your over priced coffee break except it is just a feminist anthem for a clown who longs for the trapeze.

But there WASNT a trapeze. there was just me and you. and then there was just me.

Before

 

i think i meant i am homesick for me,...when i loved you

Portal into you

 

I get so homesick sometimes...for my old body, for trees that have bccn chopped down,..for you when you loved me. Autumn mixes it all up, a deck of cards with all your faces, swirling about amongst the trash and leaves. Finally.... it begins to feel like the end of summer. The demise of an endless Friday.

Tropical Depression 13

Tropical depression 13 came and changed everything. A long slow 3 day rain with wind circulating, it like sucked some of the stale hot old humid air out and washed everything off...replaced it with some new cool air from somewhere. From somewhere else. someplace elsewhere

Alive to See

But why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see.

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

One night to be confused

Cold War Kids - Louder Than Ever (Live At Third Man)

the place where the medicine isn't

out of medicine for about a week. Wow this feels pretty wretched. Prozac-less dreams. "head full of pesticide." Charlie Chaplin films stream on netflix.  We check our phones too much...no one is ever there, on mine at least.  Mid summer mardi gras. Like, these people can't get enough, for real. No floats not many cops, just happy drunks in feathers and masks and giant tedious handmade costumes. paper mache and felt and fabric and god only knows what else. Malibu rum. a lot of it, too.  Withdrawing from this pill makes me feel very blank but obviously i am talking quite a bit. and laughing and stumbling. this is me having a Good Time. I dont know where we are going or who these people even are.

art. this is something i may should recover from. painting earlier, paint everywhere. the doorknob, the phone, my glasses. jesus leave me alone. school starts wednesday. the bathtub is broken. pretty sure i didnt pay the electric bill. Well you get one shot at this and you get to do it all alone. and don't forget that, doll. not for a second.

If I could ride out to the lake on a bike on a cool autumn day I would. I would look for you, but you wouldnt be there. You are in another city with another family with another woman with a child. with a picnic or maybe just a book. just you and a book. the birds make a cry a little bit. I hate putting gas in a the car, christ do i hate it. but this day there wouldnt be any of that nonsense, just me and a camera. and some big eyes in my face to soak up the world. you dont get it for long, though. you get some "moments' and everyone is so okay with that. Living for some moment I already lived for. like, twenty times. i m going to make a monument to this moment, though. im going to make it out of digital dots and styrofoam. something that will last. not like diesel fuel. like love. this imaginary day, like the scar on my stomach, will always be there, so i wont forget where you are not, and where i wont ever be. Sometimes you have to just embrace the negative space, and curl up next to it, and be okay with it.

Day 3

3rd sad day. Red eyed and blue. I am fine. just like always. I dont have the guts it takes to disappear from view. I guess it will just be this way for a while, until the pendulum swings or the clocks in my belly tick forward or the glass breaks or the moon changes phases and eventually I will forget.

So i was standing on the edge of a grave and I was alone and the hole was for 97 years of life and the sun was real hot and i put my arm around my sister bc i wanted someone to touch me and no one did. her eyes are so blue, she looked at me. she told me to be still. there was a prayer and stuff.

We giggle like little girls over the food, country food...and at our cousins ....those people you only see at events in sterile rooms with lots of metal folding chairs.

Eventually we all get stunned by how not fun life can get i suppose.

I am glad answering machines aren't around much anymore. i hated that blinking 0.

Lonely is as Lonely does

Lonely is an eyesore

Rogue Wave - Lake Michigan

Null

So you guys can be articulate and smart all you want but I am here for the beer. And don't ask me about books because i never read one and don't ask me about art bc i never saw any. I went to sleep, i went to work. I dont want to say things eloquently or have my life arranged in a pretty neat row. I did before, but now I don't. I do not want to be thin or healthy or wise or fast. I don't want to love you, either. I also want to stop saying 'I.' Forever. the end.

I am aging without sound

Baby Picture

It's in the heart of the grape where that smile lies. It's in the good-bye-bow in the hair where that smile lies. It's in the clerical collar of the dress where that smile lies. What smile? The smile of my seventh year, caught here in the painted photograph. It's peeling now, age has got it, a kind of cancer of the background and also in the assorted features. It's like a rotten flag or a vegetable from the refrigerator, pocked with mold. I am aging without sound, into darkness, darkness. Anne, who are you? I open the vein and my blood rings like roller skates. I open the mouth and my teeth are an angry army. I open the eyes and they go sick like dogs with what they have seen. I open the hair and it falls apart like dust balls. I open the dress and I see a child bent on a toilet seat. I crouch there, sitting dumbly pushing the enemas out like ice cream, letting the whole brown world turn into sweets. Anne, who are you? Merely a kid keeping alive  - Anne Sexton I love her poetry, probably too much if such a thing can exist....if you can actually love poetry too much. Her poetry is the first thing i read that actually made sense, made sense like the bible makes sense to some people. LIke, Oh i get it, i believe in it,bc i already know it is true.  Surely it comes from a place of self absorption...i mean, clearly i love her work bc i relate to it. i relate to it in all its sickness and filth and beauty. and awkward subjects and rejection and...no one wants to hear this side of it all. this side of life. the side that some of us can't escape from. Oh well. I m on vacation. I left Louisiana for Michigan for a week. Why does nothing ever feel like relief? I will say I do love that lake..really and truly with much of a passion... i connect with nature in a way that is uncanny..even to me... in a way that surprises me when it happens. What else is there to connect to?

33!

Today is my birthday and I am happy because I have a lot to be thankful for such as the grass and sky and horizon and my family and all these new friends I have made...not too mention all my precious old friends. bc i may be sad a lot and i may focus on my losses too much at times but I am not ungrateful. Even this aging body, that made it another year, is an object of my appreciation today. Lately it hurts me physically quite a bit, but my bones and flesh and I are finally making some sort of peace. For years, ever since it tried to grow, i have poisoned, stabbed, starved, cut and loathed my body....like so many other women I know...it's no secret, either, that I did all this. Most of us do, in some ways. Maybe for a lot of us its a high school phase, but some of get sucked in, to the anxiety and mental anguish of merely BEING and this totally abstract non tangible torture becomes REAL in your physical body so you let it live there because that way, it has a place. Maybe if we can deconstruct the invisible monster, instead of the deconstructing the body, we can heal. not sure. I think that is what i am doing, anyway. Bc the bigger and older and more imperfect my body gets, the more i LIKE it. and the more i like me. 

Of coure I mourn my old self and I miss her. The people I used to know, the people who used to touch me, the places i went and the way I experienced all of this through a body i have since shed like old skin. sloughed off. Birthdays are for mourning as well as celebrating. We gain, we lose, we hit and miss and we love, we forgive, we hurt and we heal. That's all we can do. Happy birthday, me. Happy unbirthday, you.

blogger, please!

Everytime i get this blog to a manageable state, blogger reformats something and  all my pics disappear. wtf blogger?! really?.... why do you keep doing this to me. Its not like we are dating.

Godot

Waiting for someone who isn't coming back is like some emotional torture on another level. Whether they died or left or just forgot to stay....there is an agitation between body and brain. Even after you KNOW that you KNOW that they aren't calling, they aren't returning......your heart still has this anticipation, this apprehension..as if just maybe.

But they are gone. and it is done, and you just have too keep moving forward because you have no choice. but at the same time there is this nagging pain, this "what if," this "maybe", this longing for something that isn't true ...that you have to wrestle. You have to wrestle that longing like an untimely angel. Like an unlikely ghost you never asked for.....

never is a promise

I haven't showered since you left..or washed dishes. or heard from you.
wrapped up in madness, now i am standing solid eroding slowly by this
rapid fluid of energy..living i believe it is called. clinging to you then suddenly
clinging to stars. I will probably never forgive you for who you are...or me, for loving you so much.

in this place, all we have are illusions. forgive me a second for trying to resuciate the Never-Will-Be
to paint the features of a face on Never Was.

army of lies like ants one after the other and i loved every sting and now i recover in a capsule of self and breathing and stale smoke and heat and shattered tower bits bc where i lose is where i breathe in nothing but total freedom and all the crushing pain breaking bursting lungs of alive

I wish i could find a blank cool silent room where i could be alone and rest for as long as it took to not feel this exhausted, this used up and this unforgiven

June 9

Starring scarring fading falling…rising….burned out and then blinked back to life in a waking dawn new light filters through the old panes and across ….ankles, cheekbones and the gentle curve of stomachs.

Days weeks months. I wanted one more day with you.  Cold wind and then rain crashing down like teacups. Chattering like porcelain teeth. A baby cries in a dream startled awake the mocking birds .

Gulls casting shadows across the rippled sand. A ruined castle and a brand new plan.  A life bursting forth from a shell, cracked across the sea floor twelve times and then washed away again.

The broken vase in the garden of dirt and this concrete prison cell sold over and over with real estate signs rotting down to the core of a trashy river.  A River Rising without permission and a million landlocked knock kneed jaw thrusting punching pushing….

Up river to the lake, all for a glimpse at the stars home is this nest, wisps of thread and sticks and scribbled words faded into looseleaf. Then your lead broke. And your heart broke. And a thousand clichés tumbled out like bouquets.

The admission of guilt, the freedom moves up stream to a place were deer sleep and reflections are never seen in dew drops on pear leaves opening for mist at morning and all across the sleepy soft ground the grass pushes up, reaches for everything

Thursday was Vibrant

This is a colored pencil sketch I did a few days ago. The first drawing in the new  house. I like this new place and I like this neighborhood a lOT. It feels better than the old one. I am still tired and getting settled and adjusted which for some reason for me always is a longer process than seems necessary but whatever, right.

There is a corner store around the block that i can walk too - this morning i got a potato, an orange, 3 boiled eggs and a tomato and the guy gave me a free cup of coffee. This is all new to me, having lived in places that were not easy to navigate on foot. Then I walked to work and saw this on the way:

spray painted on a wall. The street art down here is cool, bc this is a relatively small place and there is not a TON of graffiti, so the art is like little gems scattered about...when you see its a nice surprise...amidst the ruin, crumbling walls, closed parks, cracked up streets and abandoned houses.....oleandars, magnolias, jasmine .....and vibrant shutters over the windows of rehabbed houses.

My sister's tattoo

 

So it feels a little inappropriate to feel 'proud' of someone for getting a tattoo but the thing is, I  know that it means something important. I know bits and pieces of what all she has been through ...and i know a lot of her struggles have been similar to mine. 

And I know also that most of them have been very secret.  

A phoenix is an appropriate symbol for what we do. 

what so many of us do.

xoxox

I guess, right?

Yall. i saw this new therapist. okay i suck. whatever, it helps. Maybe. the idea of paying a stranger to care does not bother me like it bothers most people. it feesl Appropriate. For some reason. Anyway she, does visual stuff which works SO WELL for me. Like, i i used to make my grocery lists (back when i made lists) with little drawings of what i was going to buy, not words. so maybe she can help. Look, whatever -  i just want the pain to stop, okay. forgive me for indulging in THERAPY. Mental illness is like, the LUXURY of the new age, instead of worrying if my refugee camp is going to be attacked and I Will be raped, I worry about counting dumb things and panic attacks and concrete and steel and the stock market. I can't help it, I am american in 2011. i don't know. I don't know how to be anything else but alive and feeling. and trying to make sense, ya know?

So yeah, like i want to be okay, i inherited a set of bad chemicals for coping but instead of giving into it I am (still) trying to become a person who is strong enough to help another, to make  a difference in the bullshit of capitalism and the global economy. It is hard to find your place in this world. Amongst cnn and the unemployment line, your own horomones and Cold 45. the news, the earthquakes, the tsunami and your bank statement.  whatever, im trying to live. and Love, too. i guess. Right?

 

Reaching for something that isn't there

 

I wrote your name on the side of my shoe

to fade out as I walked near

you as near as

i feared.

the reality of waking old ghosts

this aging face of mine

shouldn't look back

fearless hearts.
mirror images
broken vase and ruined plan
the only thing that comforts me more than music is silence

it has such a sweet embrace

and that bitter truth of emptiness

like a sky full of stars you

cant 

touch

Oh, well

 

This is from the puppetry museum in Atlanta

Sometimes the more people I am around the more isolated I feel. I saw this new doctor today. Nothing ever feels as good as that old comfortable poison, the one they swore would kill me. Oh, well.

i cut off my hair

Or should that be I cut my hair off? Or i just cut it? anyway whatever it is, I did it. and it was looooong and now it is long and gone. And hair is probably way too symbolic for my voodoo aesthetic but i must say sometimes things have to change. and so you change them.  Whatever. Hadee, my dog didn't mind. I think he liked it.


This is some random sculpture I saw in someone's yard. I kind of love it.

Beloved

Easter Sunday I visited my grandmother's grave. I don't know if other people take photographs of graves but we do. I have a photo of my grandmother laughing and sitting on her tombstone  -  she bought it years and years before she died. Anyway she had a wicked sense of humor. I miss her tremendously. She taught me to drive a car. She pierced my first boyfriend's ears. She showed me me how to do long division.

Mourning rituals. He said I was grieving, I drank vodka. My aunt she built little shrines to her dead daughter all over the house. I wore Donna's clothes for two weeks after she died. Sister says the pain never fades you just get used to it...grow up twisted around it like a vine. My dad says wounds heal on their own.

I can't imagine your pain and I don't want to. But secretly, I do. Grief is sacred. No, it isn't. Its as universal as dirt. but not like this. Yes exactly like this. I dream her all the time. I don't want to do this again. I will have to do this again. It's not the same for everyone.

I Post Pictures bc one day i am going to forget. and i am going to look back and say oh, i was there. and you were there with me.

Me, My Sisters and My grandma, 1984

The Con

Today was a Wednesday

Yesterday i came home and fell into a deep sleep full of nightmares and woke up in my clothes all confused at 6 this morning. It was another day. I gathered up my dog and went to the park. On the ground beneath the giant old live oaks that are dripping with curly gray moss, this little cardboard heart cut out was waiting for someone to find it. I did.

When i stopped to photograph it, Ellie calmly laid on the dew covered grass for a few minutes....then broke out in a mad dash of snarls and barks and tried to attack a friendly retriever who was coming to say hello. In her animal protective fury she pulled me over and my coffee splashed everywhere. The guy with the dog was looking at me like I was an alien. In a crashing confusion of leash, dog, coffee-mud, and grass I managed to not smash the camera and not get hurt except for my knee which now has a nice bruise. Good morning world. Good morning park. Good morning, cardboard heart in the grass.

My dog is looking at me all proud like she just saved us both from a dragon or something. "Are you effin kidding me?" Yeah, I said this out loud to the dog.

I wish she could learn to tell the difference between friend and foe, but I wish this for myself as well. The friends I have made here may as well be enemies, but that retriever was pure gold. Maybe i should have been a non-human, then maybe my species would make sense to me. So, we go home both wet and muddy and climb back into bed. I start drawing my foot.

At lunch, I walk down the street to be in the sun. There is a hospital nearby and I walk past. I hear water hitting pavement. Glancing to my left, I see a nurse squatted down peeing beside her car. Seriously.

There is birthday cake at the office later and i eat a small piece. I am struggling to be normal. Afterward, I want to throw up. I don't.

Today was a Wednesday. Life is funny, but I am too tired to laugh.
The End.

Me at Work

This is me at work. I am saving an endangered mantle. I wish I was saving an endangered species... but oh well.

I have a cool job. I am not sure why my internal and external worlds meet in tornados....keep it together, girl. We got miles to go before we sleep.

exhausted...

that is all.

What else can i say?

I don't take rejection very well why don't you just make this easier on everyone and fall madly in love with me. And, of course, you know that by 'everyone,' I mean me. I have slipped back into self absorption lately and it is not very becoming.

Bc life is not that simple or easy and you can rarely choose who you love. You can decide to continue to love someone and be there but you can't just make someone want you despite all the bad lady mag advice in the world. and why would you even want to? I just want something real, but you see, i don't even believe in love, love is a dragon I slayed long long ago so why does it continue to rise up inside me like a starving beast driven by nothing more that a primal need to survive by feasting on touch and laughter and kisses and hope and companionship and someone to go to the goddamn park with. I mean not really. I'm not really that desperate just confused about they way we all interact with each other.  And how nothing lasts. Nothing lasts so you have to get good at being okay with loss. And that is not easy bc it defies logic. The need for other humans is some animal thing i hardly comprehend. People say animals don't "feel" things like we humans do and so, fine, they don't. but they feel. I have seen a mama cow mourn her dead calf for days. literally days, walking around wailing a god awful cry. Chimps will carry their dead around with them sometimes. It is like a version of the connection is broken but the beast can't let go. Dogs that are raised together will sometimes go mad when separated...crying, chewing their fur off, becoming lethargic.

Is the point to experience as much as you can, go as far as you can, learn as much as you can, see, feel, make, become and breathe and do all you can for this flickering moment we are alive or is it to surround yourself with the people you love and cherish them every second that they are breathing? because you can't have both, sweetheart. But you may want to quit being such an extremist.