The center of winter came and she was always wasted. These days, always faded. When the first snowstorm came this year, the flakes were a soggy gray, not the brilliant pearls she remembered dreaming of as a child. They didn't flutter softly, they sputtered and crumbled upon the windowsills and evaporated into the cold emptiness of December. Nothing solid, nothing lasting. Not even some measly ephemeral beauty, light and soft or surreal. Just static. Her mind was blank. She couldn't rely on misery any more than she could joy. Her hair was limp. Spun gold, they liked to call it, back when she was the woman every man craved and chased. She would brush it until it shone blinding in the sun, and hung thick and silky like royalty tapestry. If only she hadn't always been so desirable, maybe then her youth wouldn't have dried up so fast. Tall and curvy timebomb with perky tits and a wit as sharp as a bed of sewing pins. Nearly overnight she woke up and was dead. Blonde bombshell, finally exploded. She blamed her mother.

With the cold living in my extremities,
today home is a strange & familiar distance away
soothing but aching and. Anxious.
Home in the smell of burning cedar
and the whiskey barrel plant in the front,
that threat of death in the first frost
that leaves the taste of youth behind for once.

Shoes on the stone fireplace shone just right, and


We speak of those beloved road trips in the maroon wagon-Chevy
with
So much cactus carsickness,
and the small garden patch of forest remembers me-
Waving as rocks for my melancholy goodbye.
Yet it has moved into a new era
of unlined stillness,
less shrieks and a different breed of peace
beyond
the sizzling blue hour
the wooden tree swing
(stolen for a dream-future)
the advent calendars
the mini Christmas trees
and the scent of Nana's sweater
just like the bed of plush,
head on chest
rocking
rocking.


Today home is long and colder.
Home in the bottle of vodka hidden in the closet,
in an old man's clumsy stumbling grace
and slip of the hand,
that old blood leaking antiquity of love
and the slight sigh of content loneliness.
Loneliness of
Complacency,
of loss and of duty
and of slow,
steady,
restless simplicity.
Repeated tasks and the comfort of nothing.
Fill the need like history's steady thump-beat,
rusting carpenter fingers
that crinkle and bend over the folds of sawdust oceans.
His bones creak while the old house speaks.


The age and streaks of silvered time struck her down overnight
Cigarette after cigarette
so her pores can stretch more and more
...tight.
And in the pair of undecipherable
glass tumblers of bourbon and cognac
there are shared laughs and a yielding awareness,
but sleeping always brings that same loneliness,
all parties alongside the soft isolation.




Papa and his dahlings and some jambalaya stew
The night rolled in and all were sockless in their shoes
Freezer crackers, five, four, two
Solidity smeared and so did you.

merely thoughts in blurbs


Although I am coming ever-closer to graduating with a degree in journalism, sometimes I am utterly torn on my own beliefs about the integrity and values of the media today. Of course, people become journalists for a variety of different reasons, and you will never hear me deny the necessity and power of good journalism. "Giving voice to the voiceless," we call it. However, as I observe so many of the trends in our society today, including mindless television, the growing obsession with technology, and the declining quality of expectations that people hold on what is being reported and what is "news-worthy," I can't help but feel my father come out in me. I can't help questioning my own choice of career and exactly where I hope it may take me. Not that I am opposed to technology, mind you-after all, here I am, typing this on my delightfully sleek Macbook laptop. In fact, I also just joined Twitter, to help me keep up to speed with our so rapidly moving world. However, it really saddens me sometimes to step outside of myself and beyond the comfort zones and crutches that we all so often rely on, and see the sad truth of what society is becoming in this atmosphere of "growth", la sociedad actual.
Sometimes when I open my eyes wide, I don't recognize the skin I'm in, or the ashpalt I walk.



...The dictatorship of the single word and the single image, even more devasting that a single party, is imposing a life whose model citizen is a feeble consumer and a passive spectator, built on the production belt according to the US model of commercial television.


Maybe, baby, I'm just not built for speed.

oh yeah, totally turning that into a song

Kansas City Shuffle

The Fence
Part 1

Once upon a time there was a woman-child, and
at the bottom of the dirty water
of a claw-foot bathtub
she found herself
staring back,
alone,
one man deep
in a makeshift mansion in the soft-edged suburbs of Kansas City.
The epitome of alone,
with soft pink florals in the comforter
and the wallpaper
and her soul shaken and broken
stumped and trumped up,
the rose soap and the heavy linen curtains
and the whisper of foxes behind the fences
of black wrought iron
in the backyard at night.



And in the depth of night the wolf-dog would escape
to hunt downy hides,
somehow leaping those privacy fences,
terrific heights of borderlines
and over 50 feet of seemingly impassable wood,
but wood rots and cracks
(the monsters fall silent in the forest)
and even as it stands at its tallest
among the hunch in its splintered back
a secret builds itself

around
and around the mere strength of one sound.
One light,
the light breaks over the hill country clouds
and the wolf-dog is on his side,
bleeding from gun shot wounds.
And in times when his voice is unrecognizable
and the closet seems much more wide-open
than these spaces,
I remember.
All it takes is one angry farmer.
Sometimes freedom is disguised,
make of it what you may
paint it
and take it
take pride in it,
like that fence she slaved over
to keep the wolves at bay.








So maybe his words hold truth,
our only real ancestors are fireflies,
our only connection to the light
the light that both blinds
and drives us forward,
keeps us moving towards the
greener pastures
on the other end of the fence. That fence.
One and the same,
the fear that breaks
and the faith that binds,
sticks and wraps them tightly together
like gorilla glue
and then rips jagged across the sides
like guerilla warfare,
your own and personal-sized.
What is most your own in these moments,
the moments
that own you unexpectedly,
swinging you with strict joy from end to end as if there isn't one,
when only moments before it was
strapped against your neck,
around and around and pulling, choking. black vision.
Stripping your
flesh like bark that's crackling,
now peeling to reveal what lies beneath
such rainbows and colors of ecstasy
(honesty)
that you believed to only be worthy
of those wildest of dreams,
now real, Real.
But-careful, so fragile. Strong and yet so fragile.
Delicate and headstrong and exquisitely unbreakable.
Hold on.
Hold on.



You say you want to walk on the other side
but how can you tell what lies there is what's right?
I do not know much about the mysterious ways of the world
but i know you are beautiful

with every inch of me;

you breathe.
As you breathe,

breathe in
The ways of the world, I don't understand them
but I know that merely by the paper thin folds of
the fawn hands that swirl henna along my palm lines,
trembling lightly,
exist lifelines;
Simply the floating voice like bell jingles
of the Indian girl close at my left
adorning my skin,
those foreign syllables,
alone are enough to draw me to the desire
for the distant lands
of a country I know virtually nothing about.


Please don't ask me
which grass is a more vibrant shade of green
because I will tell you that
my breath catches
when your feet turn slightly in
as you sing near me,
to me and through me
and as your toes curl
and stack upon themselves you just can't see.
You
string me up like your beloved fishing pole.
You roll right through me
and pull yourself through soil
like white rain-flowers
in the damp dream hills alongside
the gravel.
Every stroke of paint is for you.



And sometimes I humor the idea;
it almost slips from my tongue towards
your ears as I graze that winter beard-
admitting out loud that we ended up in Guatemala by default,
when suddenly left was right
and wrong was newly defined,
our right of passage through the other
and the other made all the sense in the world
make sense.


And in the womb of the world he crawls to his feet

the world, the world is all the timing we need.
To get by, is each other and the idea of an anchor
that was really here
all along.









diamonds growing in the mountain
beneath the pressure of all time
they grow in hope and expectation
waiting for your hands to find
cause only you could reach inside me
and figure out the worth





And, oh
the Reverberation
(oh, for the love of you).

Once the realization is accepted
that even between the closest human beings
infinite distances continue,
a wonderful living side by side can grow,
if they succeed in loving the distance
between them which makes it possible
for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Jaundice

The bears and you


Silence is knowledge.
It is when you finally find yourself alone that your demons step out of the shadows,
claws bared and eyes glowing.
And your love is in the dark without a nightlight.
Suddenly you find the scent of the blood under your own
bones
and you smile as you go under.



The emptiness beckons like a gnarled finger in the nightshade
of November
and November is only rightful in itself
when the cold seeps into your flesh from the inside,
not the air.
Blood is crackling and you feel it all right there.
In that moment, you feel it all,
you crumble and the sickness takes hold,
Succumb to the heaviness of
the disquiet,
that disturbing yellow stillness that swallows.
Become the sea of winter at the edge of the night,
just before the sun returns from sleep-
Only this time it remains where it lies
so that you may lie with yourself and the white heat
of renaissance.

I, In Season

Into I go




My hands shook while I lit the candles.

My legs are weak today. I am content even as I am questioning my path. Darkened even as theirs is lit with incense ash and purple, pink, white wax. The sparkle in my step is in the colored foil and the jelly beans and gummy rolls, the trolls and pink hair and little ghosts and bows and stickers and lipstick and glitter. Together we squeal, building our castle kingdom in the gold tree. I can nearly hear her tongue ring click against her teeth as she laughs. That gorgeous close crop of hair, tight against her neck, and so I set out plenty of of my favorite hair clips.
She is in the wind tonight. Reflecting in the silvered skull ring, minty glee in the peppermint schnapps. The wax folds upon itself and evaporates and still they burn, hot and lasting.

Already such a wild child at an age so young and ripe, but her heart was soft and true and right.

She left my life in April of the year I was thirteen, and only a few months prior I found an unexpected counterpart, a sister, the best friend I didn't know I needed, a strange and unprecedented love that I did not, could not find in another. Exit one spirit, enter another.
Sweet blonde bubble of joy and laughter, and through her and our friendship the process began, I very slowly and painfully began learning how to love myself. She was my my brightest lights, my darkest secrets, the ache of the growing pains in web of bones that ached for affinity to infinity. She helped heal through fulfilling, filling, building previously unrecognized and unrealized desires and fears and dreams.

Sometimes I am so taken aback by these beautiful cycles,
when everything seems to wind and twist into labyrinths and then suddenly a moment of awareness pricks your new in season skin and you see it has circled back around and joined with itself.

And she was what I subscribed to, the only confidante I surrended myself to and with, and
one day I woke up broken. I woke up and found I had sacrificed myself for the sake of that surrender, I had lost what it meant to be me. I didn't know what was most mine, my own, and no one elses....not hers, and not one of many his. Just mine, mine for me to realize and then share the way it was meant to be shared, not spread too wide and thin or stretched near snapping. Not painted black,
I painted over the colors with black and told myself I was proud of what I had created, that the
smoky charcoal was the truth. I trusted that truth and then the black choked me, morphed overnight into handcuffs that bound me to her bed and my own fear and hatred of myself.

A beloved twin, my altar ego, but it is change that is the oldest of all friends and the most ancient of truths. The spirit took flight and I opened my eyes to a world that did not include her flaxen mystery, her companionship. She was no more in the golden tree, it was only Cody and me, I was back to my roots and with a change of name and a couple choice betrayals (fierce yet blessed), her halo became a stranger. I found forgiveness the second time around, but only through walking away, letting go. Circles may always come back around, but sometimes, when direction is hazy and obscure, forward movment must be forced until you find your own footing.

And around the same time we both bowed out, I began to trust the tide, I allowed change to pull me out to sea; there in the water, in the womb of the world, I swam and swam and swam until my bronchi nearly popped with capacity to love and hurt. I swam deeper until I built up the strength to push past the sting of breath, the fear of depths. There at the bottom, I found not one, but two more soulmates. Two best friends lost, swallowed into the stretch and cold breadth of endlessness, and two much stronger bonds were discovered, forged there in the flowing waters. I found them like treasure on the banks, on the ocean floor, with lungs of life and eyes the likes of sands of time that only exist in dreams.

You will never hear me denying there is a design, everything happens in season, even the ones most seemingly devoid of reason.

It is never long that I question what I am fighting for.











And as I finally blow out the flickering flames, running only on their own fumes of recollection,
I'm curious as to where the stuffed tiger is now- perhaps keeping sweet Seal company in the thereafter. Another life, another time.


But for the grace of God, go I.





Happy Halloween, Feliz November,
Merry Día de los Muertos



for Cody