04/04/2016

What a strange thing it is

To outgrow a place.

It’s like the squares of the sidewalks don’t quite fit your feet anymore.

It no longer feels

Like the ceilings were built for you.

You look at the boys and girls who have taken your place and you wonder,

Do they feel the same infinity you did?

Do they attach themselves by their shoestrings just like you did?

Everything is different

Yet everything is the same,

If you had told yourself then how temporary it all was--

You would have laughed right in your own face.

Last Time

The last time you saw me my hair was still it’s natural blond and I still believed I could put off growing up forever.

The last time I saw you, you still adored big words, everything anyone said was a point to be debated.

The last time we saw each other I still thought the words ‘each other’ were one word, I still thought we were one word.

The last time you saw me, I was still who I thought I was, I was still adamant about things.

The last time I saw you it was still summertime, the sunlight was still thick enough to set your copper colored hair on fire.

The last time we saw each other we weren’t yet an almost.  We were the biggest almost I’ve ever had.  

The last time you saw me I was confused.  I was at sea.  You were a map that I couldn’t stop charting but our coordinates didn’t align.

The last time I saw you you were in love with me, so much so, you wished you had kissed me and I still don’t know what stopped you.  

The last time we saw each other we sat in a tea shop underneath an oyster sky and I watched you talk about the nature of time and place in a way that fascinated me endlessly.

The last time you saw me I had just been swimming in Lake Michigan, I was chilled to the bone and I felt the most zoetic.

The last time I saw you you, your hand barely left the space between the bottom of my shirt and the top of my pants, it continuously makes me smile that for all your big words and fantastical exclamations, you are still just a boy.  

The last time we saw each other we talked about big things, fragmented things, abstract things that in retrospect are hazy.  We drove through apricot city mist.  

The last time you saw me your voice in my hair reduced me to nothing more than skeleton ash and fiberglass lungs.  You make me intangible.  

The last time I saw you you scared me, you scared me because you are larger than the words we write and all day long I waited for something that wouldn’t happen.

The last time we saw each other we tried to outrun time, we roamed those streets so well it could have been our job.  

The last time you saw me so much had yet to happen.  I was at the sunrise of the sunset.  I was worried about all the wrong things.  

The last time I saw you you told me you loved me, you told me I was song lyrics and the sky and you told me we would be ok.  

The last time we saw each other we swung, we told stories, we held on.  We tried to fit four months into one weekend.

Did we pull it off?

The last time you saw me I was so many things.  I was up and down and peach and blush and gold.  I was your hands and your eyes and your words.  I was more you than me.

The last time I saw you your eyes looked mixed up, you asked what I meant and I couldn’t tell you.

The last time we saw each other we danced around the truth and danced around the sidewalks.  We got lost in a park and all the alleyways smoldered.  Every moment shimmered.   

Send Help

Help.
I have been trying for so long to find who I am inside this physical shell.

I have been working for a better understanding of who I think I'll grow into once I give myself time for that.

I have been looking in all the wrong places.

I have looked beneath my collarbones where stars have planted themselves.
I have looked in the sandstone cave that has replaced my gut on the nights when every name that isn't yours leaves me wanting.
I have felt between my fingers for something unexpected but they've always been the same hands.

Maybe who I want to find isn't in here.
Maybe who I'm looking for is somewhere out there.
Maybe they are a flashed reflection in a window of a building we've forgotten the name of.
Maybe the one I hope to find got lost among the leaves on a summer day when we tried to become part of something bigger than ourselves.
I've looked underwater. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.
I've searched behind the thorns. Maybe I wasn't searching well enough.

These children's eyes are so like a pool in the way they reflect and yet plummet.
I miss my pool eyes.

Like golden leaves we let ourselves dissolve

we are so much bigger than this place.

We are as big as we want to be, we are as golden as the late evening light.

What is the best way to feel this?

What are the best letters to string into words to string into lines to string into rhymes to describe this?

How can I impart to you the way those eyes look when they glance in my direction?

How can I color your mind the way I am feeling, the dusty lavender that comes with a summer day well spent?

Soft green grass and sweet cool water, hills and melody wrap into a song that we sing all month long.  

There is a cavity just below my ribcage that I have come to know,

I call it the sandstone cave.

It is there where my deepest things hide,

It is there where I feel the strongest.  I feel it, full, on dark lonely nights, full of words I barely utter to the world.  

But I feel it more,

I feel it stronger,

On the full golden nights and the green sparkling days.  I feel it, empty and waiting, when the windows of my little sage colored car are rolled down and the breeze is fresh and I am smiling.

I feel it when something is even better than I expected, when my expectations are not met but are exceeded.

I feel it when all circumstances have aligned and I have ended up exactly where I want to be with exactly who I want to be.

I feel it when all the tabs on my little wave covered laptop are open to new places and new things.  Italy maps, workaway.info...There is so much out there to see.

I feel it when it is 1 am and everything is funny, laughing until I can barely breathe and I’m on top of the world.  

Nobody Knows Where To Stand At A Funeral

1/29/2016

Funerals are for the living.  

Grey and hazy we look through the tears in our eyes at what has passed before us.

A man I don’t know in a suit stands before us, telling us how to move our bones in the space like it is some kind of perfromance.

I guess it is.

I am tired.

I’ll be run dry before the day is over,

every time I

try to speak

or try to smile

or try to laugh,

I hear is his voice,

raspy,

old, yet full of life,

“Oh, is that right, doll.”

A smile always on the edge of it.

I have become the shroud around my shoulders.

I have turned into the bag hanging across my chest.

Maybe I can disappear inside these clothes,

Maybe I can go back to where they came from.

The scarf was plucked from a stand at a bus stop in Guatemala, I thought the soft color would be a good addition to my collection.  

I never thought it would become this.  

I gleaned the bag from a pile at Goodwill,

I knew it would become this.

Something that has held so much and been so many places.

It has held spray paint and words and snacks and adventures,

and now it is here, holding me together.   

Small

These things that we call our own
Are not really ours.

They are ours, for a moment, maybe more, until they're back,
Another tick on the clock
We can do all we want
But these things that we call our own
Are not really ours
And this is comforting, 
If you think about it.
These infinities,
These eternities,
Are not all ours.
They are not just ours,
Some parts,
A minute,
A moment,
80,
90, years if you're lucky, 
We are granted
These small eternities 
To claim.

Cinder Block

If you look at the tops of the domiciles it almost looks like summer, the sky is a crisp cerulean and the sun is effulgent, for a second I can consign myself to oblivion that we are barely into winter at all, for a moment I can disregard that this is just the beginning of the next three months of caliginosity.

Near the origination of things we can find what we’ve obscured, somewhere underneath last autumn’s leaves there is a diaphanous layer of gold promising something revived, something we thought was gone permanently.  

There is a cinder block wall near the fringe of town, we call it the first wall, not because it happened before everything else, but because that is where everything happened first.  Kisses, drinks, smoked cigarettes.  

On the other side of this palisade there is a marble town, empty integuments of people we used to cherish lie beneath the earth in infinite torpidity.  

Testing

We are the broken youth of tomorrow
Pieces of yesterday and today
Dynamite dancers
Misfits, cynics, arguers, talkers, manic heart breakers.
Call us the broken ones
Call it the year of the broken ones
We lay here beneath the stars,
Looking up, trying to find bits of ourselves in the universe.
We climb things,
getting higher
Checking to see if gravity can reach us up here.
We dig holes, 
going below
finding ourselves scattered among the scum of society.
Away from the reach of the light
we sit
and we realize 
The problem was never below us,
above us,
or behind us.  
It was always right here, inside of us,
hiding behind our lack of love for the world.

Poem

1//December//2015
I have seen the colors of my movie projector splashed across two entwined hands.

I have seen the way the light in the sky bounces off the clouds on late July evenings.

I have seen the way smiles fade, slowly, until their faces are back, in neutral once again.

I have heard the water pipes strike up a conversation in an overheated classroom as the sky outside pined for its other.

Two years ago I ran from something I never should have left.  
One year ago I wanted something I couldn't obtain.
This year I've made peace with my choices.

There was a day that I felt myself dissolve; there was a day when my molecules were the same as those of the ocean.

Once upon a time I stood next to a lamp post that reached for the clouds as it held itself to the earth.  It was all I could grasp.  Everything else was disintegrating.

The back of the theatre: reserved.
The sides of the hallway: illuminated.

One day not too long ago, I decided to take my fate into my own hands.

“Hello, miss, I’m calling with your flight confirmation.  Yes, tomorrow.  You want it moved to today? Let me check the schedules...I’ll call you back as soon as I know.”

There is a place between the buildings in a skyline that holds infinities,
eternities,
possibilities.
It is here that I fly,
It is here that I survive.  

“Hello, airlines again.  You’re in luck, we have one spot on tonight’s flight that just opened up.  I’ll email you your ticket and travel details.  See you at the gate.”

I have seen the private smiles,
traded across heads in between.  

Clouds fall beneath,
I levitate.  
Earth falls behind,
I am large,
yet
so

so

small.

Late PM

You gave me a poetry book filled with poems of the sea, and it is perfect, because the cover is rippled with water damage like wrinkles on a wise woman's forehead. You've told me that I am golden and I believe you, because I trust you. Your lively hair and lovely eyes beg for the truth like nothing I've ever seen before. This is layered, poetry about poetry, but it makes me laugh because no rhyme scheme or colorful collection of nouns verbs and adjectives could ever perfectly depict what I am trying to say.

Paleo

There is a separation between man and nature only because we have evolved to have built one.  Back in our original days, when we were no more than rocks and dirt and moss, everything was synced up.  We lived and thrived on the rhythms of the world.  We ate what the earth provided us with and we slept when the sun went down.  Then something changed.  We began to hold ourselves above other living creatures, we began to try and change the system of the universe.  We built cities and roads and invented electricity, we tried to out wit the sun.  We have evolved ourselves right into one big web of technology and corruption and packaged food.  Now, in our modern world, we must look backwards to the instinctual wisdom of our ancestors.  Now, in the days when paleo living is a trend diet, we must learn from what we have become and search for something more.  We must find our original rhythm again. 

I dream....

       I dream of a world where nothing is forgotten.  A world where meaning comes easily and we search for ourselves in the treetops.
       I dream of a place where things are held sacred, where things hang in balance. A place where we can look at the stars yet toy with the concept of our own mortality.  A place where our infinity is not a joke.
       I dream of a mind that looks like a city, a mind that I can get lost in.  A mind where some things don't line up and some things fall out of line.
       I dream of a house that always feels like home, a house that has no dark corners.  This house is lovely and full of plants, completely void of dust.
       I dream of a school that teaches us of life, how to save money and how to find love.  A school that shows us what's truly important, a school that teaches how to be a good friend and how to save someone.
       

Light Speed

Sometimes I see my mind as a city, the tall buildings and the unique shops, so much squished in there that it’s hard to see the edges.  There are people in the city, they strut and they walk and they bike and they drive and they go about their lives while creating something from nothing.  

Normally the people move at regular speed, going from home to work to home to play to home to sleep to repeat.  They are happy and busy and sometimes sad and occasionally wishing for more.   But then I start thinking about everything and the people start speeding up and the cars start driving faster and as I think about life and love and college applications and who likes who and who likes me and I have to turn in that essay and I have to get a job and there’s that thing on Saturday night, but oh, wait I have a volleyball tournament that day and what the hell does this Spanish word mean until everything is moving far too fast and the streets are overflowing and the arteries of the city are all clogged up and the stores are selling out faster than our Chinese connections can supply them and the sky is turning orange and the mist is blocking everything and all the things happen at light speed until suddenly, it all, just, stops.

Unanswerable

He asked me
Who I was
I said
I can't answer that
She asked me
If she would be ok
I said
Yes
He asked me
Why only now
I said
I can't answer that
She asked me
If she should do it
I said
Yes
She asked me
What was wrong
I said
I can't answer that
He asked me
If we would make it
I said
Yes

Spaces

You have made me very aware of the spaces between my fingers
They have become voids,
empty, negative spaces
Golden hour is faded around the edges
Tinged with something darker
A longing
Today I ate plums from a tree until my lips turned yellow
The juice dripped like liquid summertime
But the grass beside me was empty
Lacking you
The bird's song was in E minor,
Trying to summon what I could not feel

Bookend Town

"Viroqua is...Viroqua.  It's cute and summer-y and very green.  It is quiet and I love it, but.  It feels terribly small.  I feel stuck. I know for a fact that I am made for bigger things than this little town.  I yearn to see places I have never known, I need adventure on a grand scale.  I want things to be blown out of proportion, I want the dramatic and the crazy and the messy beautiful.  I need to experience life as it is, uncut and real and raw.  This town is a beautiful place to grow up, and maybe it's the place to grow old, but it's not made for my life in-between.  It's a bookend town, the two perfect, sweet bookends on a life."

The above paragraph is an excerpt from a letter that I sent to a friend of mine.  This part I chose is the edited and orderly version of this crazy wanderlust I have been feeling lately.  I finally took the time to sit down and put that feeling into words and this is what was born. A new term: Bookend Town.

Nicotine

You ask me
What you mean            to me

How do I riddle this?

My words are as empty and used up as the oil drums around me,
scattered like toys in a child's nursery.

Signs warn faceless men of kerosene,
Alarms,
Fire hazards.

Your eyes warn me to stay close.

City hall, pall mall, nicotine.
Your words are an unseen drug.

Penultimate

April 30th. The day before May Day.  The penultimate day of English Class.
A day of spring.  A day of laughs.  A day of spreading smiles.
I ate lasagna for breakfast, and now I'm here.  Maybe it was the lasagna that changed me.
Maybe it was laced.
Laced with a pure idea of what should be and a motivation to accomplish that.
If I could talk to flowers I would tell them, I feel it too.

I feel the sun stretching itself back into shape after a long winters nap.
I feel the winds changing,
I feel my smile spreading across my face every time I step outside into the beautiful world.
I feel my heart growing back into its idea of what is right,
I feel my mind expanding, breathing in the fresh air.
I feel something,
Something good.
Something I'm going to have to call hope.
Something new, something old, something nearly forgotten.
Spring.
Thank you for coming back.
I missed you terribly.

Unnamed

This upcoming writing is a little slam poetry that I wrote during a theme week my school held about racism.  Throughout the week we had various discussions, lectures and classes and we also produced a radio show, some theatre, visual art, and a short film.  This piece coming up is a piece I wrote and performed on the radio show we produced, which will be airing in a couple of weeks.  It would be better to receive if you could hear it, but I haven't quite figured out the video portion of this blog yet so you'll have to soak it in through your eyes instead of your ears.  I hope you like it, and if any thoughts or questions arise after reading it, please feel free to email me at withglitteringwings@gmail.com  I always love to hear the thoughts of others.  Here it is folks.  A piece of slam poetry entitled....

 "Unnamed"
        As humans we are entitled to two things.  Our opinions, and giving and receiving love.  We are born into the world with something to take and something to leave behind.  We are not here to take lives and we are not here to leave sadness.  We are here to make something beautiful, to leave something worth time.
        We are not here to impose our realities onto others.  We are not here to discriminate and we are not here to judge.  Prejudice and bigotry do exist in the world but they don't have to.  We can change that, we can make them go away.  I've heard the jokes.  I've heard the pop songs.  I've heard my share of slurs and derogatory terms.  Each time I hear one based in hate I cringe, and then I wonder.
        Where is this hate born?
        Where does it come from?
        We are system of oppression founded in hate.  We are an institution of bigotry mixed with power and that's what makes us racist.  With the way things are, you'd think that after Columbine and Sandy Hook we'd have police stationed outside every school frisking every middle aged white man for guns.
        But that's not how it is.  Because somehow we've managed to set it up just right so that every black teen strikes fear into the hearts of shopkeepers, but somehow white kids manage to steal everyday.  Somehow we have managed to set it up so that every black man gets stopped on the highway but white people go speeding by everyday.
        This is a problem we're all facing.  This is a problem we're all making.  The problem is not out there.  The problem is not far away.  It is right here in all of our minds.
        How can you justify Ferguson? How can you look into the eyes of Tony Robinson's mother and tell her it's OK that her son died?
        We say that the problem is society, but we are all society, so how do you justify that? We all have to take a hint from the king of pop and start with the man in the mirror to make that change.

Five Senses: Guatemala Style

I See
The bright lights
The sun reflecting off
Of every possible surface.
Taco carts
Bundles of wood
Eyes,
Looking up.
I see lakes of bright blue
Rivers the same.
Dogs, abandoned.
Women, adorned.
Purple, yellow, silver, blue, green,
Rainbows woven into clothes
Dreams, holding it all together.

I Smell
Corn.
Always corn,
And wood smoke.
I smell tradition worked into every tortilla.
I smell bathrooms, as I walk by.
I smell blacktop in the cities, I smell tires rubbed in.
I smell rain as it drips through the fresh leaves
They smell of summer.
The air smells
And I smell it.

I Taste
Hard work.
Dedication.
I ate a meal flavored with smiles, spiced with laughter.
The main course was a giggle and dessert was hilarity.
I never knew I could taste those things,
but I can.
Laughter is sweet,
Giggles are like meringues,
fluffy and light.
I asked for seconds,
And they obliged. 

I Touch
Feelings, hearts.
They touch me,
right in the corazon.
I touch rocks that tell stories
I feel grass that grows from sadness over a village that no longer exists.
I feel sun on my face in a way only the equator can provide.
I touch ropes—nay, vines—vines that feel like ropes.
Mud in-between my toes coolly reminds me that I am alive,
And I inhale,
Fresh jungle air.

I Hear
Sounds.
Many.
All of them?
Cars beeping,
Animals laughing,
People yelling.
Tone is everything in a language that is not your own.
Do their words curve up
Or down?
Does their voice smile,
Or frown?
You tell me,
When you listen.