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