Crooked Growth

twisty spine like vine. Growing like you lean, move, walk. You are the operater? or the operated? I start physical therapy next week. The hip has not improved. I have put it off for six months but now I am like, okay, this needs to happen because I can't make it stop on my own.

I imagine my bones, but not as much as I used to. I am just not obsessed with them anymore, strangely. I would imagine them crooked and causing pain and now, I may still picture it, but the picture floats away and is replaced. Predictably, Flesh has become very enjoyable to paint. The stick souls still show up in my art, but painting layers of flesh has taken on a new life. a spark. We are a continuum, I reckon. Mind Body Brain Hand Canvas Soul. Sleep.

My dog is curled at my feet, a little piece of night sky, black and sweet.

I just imagine all thes butterflies fluttering around my head. While the wars wage and my work and bills pile up. It will all just be fine. Sometimes you have to make your own magic.

A timeless sleep

To have an obsessive personality is just one way to live. I acknowledge this and keep going, a slow walk, a jog. Sleeping for days. I am stunned by the sky. Pure awe. Again. The leaves aren't really changing here. It feels like high summer. Thick and hot and green and lush. A slightly different coolness in the rare breeze is the only natural indication that it is almost October.

Sometimes all the people look like zombies to me. All wretched and gone, lurching through their routine..bus stop, dollar store, school bus. But other days they are all so beautiful, all the people. They captivate. Like cracks in the sidewalk. Cracks in the facade.

There is so much power in vulnerability. It is all backwards. The weak are the strong and I am an animal. I am with them. on their side. I study the buildings, but I don't feel like they belong to me. Not the way the trees do. Not the way the earthworms do. Darkness is a sweet blanket for a long night. A timeless sleep.

the way home

I am tired of being well.  I am not sure this trade-off was worth it since my body feels horrible despite my best efforts at HEALTH. The world is poisoned, I have little faith in diet and exercise and all that jazz. All that jazz, all that jazzmine, gardenia, wysteria and hydrangea.  That is what I need, a sea of scents and soft light to carry me away. That is mostly what I think about lately...I am plotting an escape. Not sure how or what from or where to but I am. Something has to change. In a way that does not involve giving up.

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

there are missing pieces

The more people i meet down here the lonelier i feel. What is that about? feeling lonely? not understood? just the absence of anyone that cares or knows you?

Its okay, I mean this experience is what it is and I will be fine....I didn't expect much when I moved here. I expected to work and go to school. I wanted things to change. and they did. because i changed them. whatever, you know. I just wasn't prepared for the endurance...of being here. I prepped for the move, for the adjustment, but now that i am here and all these people are so transient and moving about and no one is tied to anything that makes sense to me. And they like it that way. I don't -  but then again I hated feeling trapped and smothered, too. All i ever wanted to be was transient. I listened to ramblin man when i was little and i wanted that song to be about me. What is all this pain about? All of our pain? Is this chemical nightmare depression anxiety crap? Or is this Just Living. Does Living mean learning to gracefully lose things you love. (or in my case, not so gracefully...yet)

I Circle the Fish

fish swimming circles inside my skull, i am.
right, wrong
write wrong
words.
say them.

Distracted. Not liking myself very much. I want OUT of my SELF.

bad things are everywhere.

good things are everywhere, too right? promise me this.

No promise good enough to keep. How long til i get over losing you? 

yes you. all of you.

 Mistakes were made, fallen flowers landed incorrectly...near your stare.

stony stare- silent creaking stairs at midnight. Careful.

I dream about my grandmothers house so often. She died in July. The day before my 32nd birthday. I haven't been back to her house since that day. My heart is so heavy with generations of loss handed down to us so we would not forget but this is heavy how do i move? Carrying all of your hearts on my back, blood drips twirling in such cataclysmic patterns over my calves and thighs and spatters over the stars on my feet down to the earth. the dirt i want to be.

I did it all for love, but sometimes a horror down inside me suggests that I did it all for obsession. a bundle of sick chemicals. buzzing outward toward your brain circuits and empty chest.

I miss you like you are dead and since you aren't i feel as if i am cheating the beloved dead by the comparison of mourning rituals. I am not. I am not.

I miss my mother and my father and the tree outside the dirty window in the house i grew up in. I need more adjectives for my clumsy chunks of words falling like drunk fish and landing like those platform black shoes from the nineties that were so good for stomping down streets littered with paper and vomit and broken glass and the flyers from the show we drove 5 hours to see.
we were never disappointed.

I have this overwhelming desire to cry your eyes out. starve your heart out. splinters for my bone machine rusting away under waves of flesh ebbing and reaching up for the moon. something is going to change and one day it is going to be better than this.

Shake out the Ghosts

 i feel the keys beneath my fingertips....swirling.... words are senseless. I am at my parents house deep in the woods and when i am here i feel like I don't exist...like i have transferred to another realm. The only safe place on earth.
There are some things i have always suspected and one was that God didn't like me very much and the other one was that I was meant to be alone. Quite possibly, I made this up. Regardless, the adventure of The Self Fulfilling Prophecy can NOT be denied.

I have been writing stories in my head but they don't make it to paper. Or pixels. Stories about Stella and a chance meeting with an old friend at a cofeeshop downtown. In a town i have never been to. She criss-crosses an unsmoked clove cigarette between her forefingers in an effort not to smoke and has a sandwich in her purse in an effort not to eat. Over strong coffee she discussed the possibilities of a strange love that she has been denied. He leaves her alone with her sketchbook. In the story i can't decide if hot tears splash down her face, if a girlfriend texts her, or if she shrugs him off and sketches his stupid fading face.

So I just leave her there. Sitting at the table...with messy hair and a dark haired boy heading toward his car in the parking lot..after squeezing her shoulder on the way out. "Take Care, Stell" are the words he leaves her with.
Stella and her sister Gypsy Rose. Hanging out in my head reliving their childhood and their parents' death and the old pick up truck and the dusty road and countless fruitless love affairs...an overdose and  walks in the cemetery.

oh well. Sometimes i mash my fingers into my face to feel my cheekbones and jaw bones. My babyfat face has gone. Sometime in the past 4 years it flickered away. Sorry you didn't get to see it, she was a sweet girl. I feel my father in the bones in my face. My cheekbones match his. and I remind myself that i want to become Wise like him. and Just. and Fair.

In a few minutes, I am going with my mother. We are going to clean my grandmother's house. My grandmother is 90 years old and she is coming home from the hospital soon. My heart is heavy. I love her so much. She is 90 years old and she is tired and I know this.

Her father worked in the oilfield. and so did her husband. and her son. and so did my father. and my husband was supposed to, I'm sure, but i left without him. Left  the idea, i guess. It wasn't what I wanted, and hey, it's not my fault that he didn't exist. That times changed so fast and I wanted paint and poet and rock n roll. My future is so unknown. I want to go to New Mexico. The farthest thing i can imagine from a swamp. I have no idea what i am doing and i feel the past slipping away ..years, decades, a generation gone....the stories I forgot to gather have scattered away...i drip paint like tears down my face in an effort to remember what we have all lost.

I didn't fit the mold or follow the path. My heart pumps out love and hate like oil and water.

obsidian

Let me make one thing perfectly clear as obsidian.
I have no idea what I am doing....but I am glad.
My (godawful) job has taught me what i am NOT....and I don't fit in there and I am so HAPPY. If i can withstand this without gettin' bitter or losing my shit, then i can possibly, hopefully become a better person..right? RIGHT?
Making money has not ever been an obsession of mine...sorry I guess i'm a  bad capitalist. whatever. Maybe that is a luxury.... that i was able to not be obsessed with money but these suit and tie guys with there 8 jillion rules JUST FOR THE SAKE OF MAKING A RULE just depress the living hell out of me. How can we get anywhere meaningful? I made the mistake of an internal journey instead of an external one. But i will tell you one thing.
i am liking what i am finding...after i dug through the gore and pain...there is something in here. something worth saving.
inside of me.
s

Is this my Mask?

Sometimes I feel so tired..inside
This painting is old... a few years.
But it still rings true.

my brain is churning and these waves
of panic keep going over me.

I have to figure something out
I have to figure out whose mask this is

Sometimes i mourn the loss of each day
I know you have to look forward and
everything...
but i remember who I used to be and
it seems like that person is dead somewhere

the good of her
and thebad of her

life is about lettin go, i keep learning that.
I keep learning that i HAVE to let go...
 i have not learned how to do it and not let it HURT.
Do you just let the pain wash over you? do you just sit with it? it hurts SO bad.
I told someone two days ago that i was not depressed anymore but...
I think i was just not depressed at THAT moment.
each moment feels like a whole new mood. This is very exhausting.
I see the doctor tomorrow.