Lux, part 2

I have felt God in the unexpected, in the mundane, in the darkest places. Somehow He has followed me, tracked me down and laid His heavy hand on my sky, compressing me into a magnetic field of confusion, and simultaneously expanding me into the highest heights of elation. I have felt God in the back of a dingy car, driving home from the club with raucous acquaintances, my thighs sticking to the leather seat and Chris Brown blasting from the stereo. I have felt God surging through the air of my favorite coffee shop, looking straight into the caverns of my mind from a fishbowl starry sky, holding my atoms together as I sat in a classroom, randomly interrupting my thought maps with a warm and wide-open feeling, reminding me of the everywhere-ness of the Divine. God has found me in a Catholic Mass in Spain, on the floor of a Buddhist temple in Thailand, in the blue morning light of my decaying apartment patio, never mind all the times He showed up in my own church. Somehow He manages to wrap His hands around a simple moment and bring forth in that moment vivid color and a lush warmth. Somehow He manages to remind me when I most need it that He is everywhere, with no exceptions or limitations, and I need only to look up just a little higher to see that the Light breaking through every window is His.

Lux, part 1

Omnipresent. Omnipotent. Omniscient. People describe God in such clinical terms. They see Him off in the cold distance, perceiving His remoteness as bitterness, percieving the walk to His house as treacherous light years, imagining their quiet entreaties never reaching His deaf ears. They wonder at the darkness, or do not feel its reach at all, but either way, they cannot see God through the thick of it, and so they disregard Him, and walk about blindly, forever running head-long into walls.

Talent on Fire

"Talent is a cruel mistress," a wise man once told me, and he was right in every regard. Crueler still is the talent you cannot keep. To have a talent that you cannot share is a burden, a curse. To have a talent that you keep locked in a cage is haunting, unnerving, unsettling at best. 

My talent was always my ability to make chaos out of nothing, on the paper and in my twisted little world. To smoke cigarettes, leaning out the fourth story window, the screen popped out by a helping hand, disregarding the crack under the door. To jump from passion to passion, to drink the cup of pure oblivion, to feel the bliss of change coursing through my tentacled veins. This was my talent. 

To apply red lipstick at an angle in the mirror, to appear as an apparatus in one life and then the next, to feel the depth and the breadth of my self and to swim in my own ocean with no fear of drowning, no matter how many times I went beneath the waves, to look constantly toward the shoreline for a savior. This was my talent.

To be the flighty favorite of offices and coffee shops, to have a story to tell, a new one at every turn, and to hold your interest with the details of new intrigues, to keep you coming back for more with new characters and new tragedies. This was my life. 

I incinerated it all, set it all aflame, with the gasoline of loyalty and the struck match of normalcy, the heat reminiscent of motherhood, the smoke of a promising future, but nevertheless a painful blaze where everything had to die. 

And still it comes back to haunt me, a ghost in many dreams and daymares, the thing that I destroyed, the chaos that I put an end to, the ocean that I dried up, the poetry that is gone. Talent is a cruel mistress, and I killed her in a shady Broomfield apartment and never even went back to pay my respects. And I keep killing her every day, renewed, with a vigor and a misplaced hatred, trying to hurt what once always seemed to hurt me, but in the process losing everything that made my face my face. 

The Grey Sky Opens

The grey sky opens

no sun to speak of here

only a filter of fog over a photograph 

of the cavern in my heart

A little fire inside,

gunpowder thrown into the flame,

destructive hands with no regard for my plans,

the Old Me has arrived. 

Wraith-like, a pale-lipped muse, 

her explosions rock me to sleep, 

her wounds keep me locked in dreams, 

chaos reigning 

when the grey sky opens

And the grey sky opens

to a moon unlit,

just a hunk of rock

in the ocean-floor sky 

And the Old Me mumbles

something about a wolf

as one yelps off in the distance,

as my bones feel that chill,

of memory holding me

as the grey sky opens

And The Old screams out

"Baby, you need to stay alive.

Take your car and just start driving

until you see the light

Take your car and just keep driving

until you can sleep at night"

And she weaves her fingers into my future

as the grey sky opens

And there's nothing I can do

nothing at all that can be done

The Old is here to stay

There's still a cavern in my heart to this day

A little sliver of my mind

Where I talk to myself 

back and forth 

all the time

And there's a place in my soul

where the mountain man feels at home

But I can't open up its doors,

until the grey sky opens

Imagined Confessions

Tell me all your half truths, tell me your lies

Tell me the things you don't say 'til you die

Deathbed confessions that don't hold a candle

To all of the things that you know I can't handle 

My thoughts are as big as the open sky

But tonight my stars will be in your eyes

The Night Shift

Three AM wishes
For warmth radiating
From the bed's other side
Realizing how valuable
The presence of your body
Is to my psyche
The fragility of my being
Drawing from the strength of yours
In deep, dreamless sleep
The exchange of love, even
In wordless and ordinary
The exchange of love, even
With your back turned to me
When I'm there, I complain
When I'm here, I miss it

Driftwood Memory

Pictures in my mind, breezing through the albums of the memories, fading in and out from reality to a time and place where I can no longer be. I find myself so enraptured with how this all happened, the trauma and drama that threw me, catapulted me, back into your world, that forced my mouth, once sewed shut, open, to spill out the detailed and natural promises of a young, battered, burn-victim of love. I remember so clearly, all of it, all of it, that gaudy pink sweater, the way that I could not, would not tear my eyes away from your face, so comforting to me, a piece of driftwood to hold onto in a cataclysmic ocean of hopelessness and fear. You saved me from it all, my dear. That first "I love you," barked out like an order, relieved at the hesitant answer, the fantastic dreams of forevers. I tested your limits back there where we once were, making sure you intended, really intended, to stay. And somehow you're still staying, somehow these pictures aren't fading, somehow the piece of driftwood grew into a boat, and you just carry me along as the blue rises and falls.

Pills: A Crazed Little Rant

Pills, pills, pills, trying to soothe my soul. Running around in the cavernous maze of my mind, trying to disperse dopamine to starving neurotransmitters. I have refugees living in my skull, living on badly baked dread and crumbs of hopeless rage. I choke down these pills every night to make them quiet, to still their twitchy movements, but I'll be damned if I'm choking down anything useful. Screw you big pharma. Give me some sunshine, real sunshine. I'm ranting now but it doesn't matter to me. Nothing really does anymore.

Drowning In These Little Moments

The light from a single bedroom lamp was distorted into sunshiny gloriousness. One kiss in the kitchen became my vow. Every little thing was blown up and into the wind. I am drowning in these little moments, drowning in my love for you, and I don't want to learn to swim. You are my ocean, blue-grey-green, twisted around me and pulling me towards nothing, pulling me towards an unknown, showing me how to get lost. I am lost in you. 

You Never Left Me

Two years ago, I thought I had it all. All I had, really, was a handful of lies. All I had was a house of cards, just waiting to fall apart. Two years ago, I wore a different ring. Today I still feel the weight of it.

You ruined me. Forever. You stomped all over my heart in your parade, shouting those "fuck offs" with confidence, killing me slowly, and I'm still not alive. Not like I used to be. The light in my eyes is still dimmer and quietly disappearing, even with the fire of real-life love lit within me. Nothing can quench the thirst you caused. I am hopeless, helpless, still under your thumb, while you forget, slowly forget, about all of your offenses. But I remember. My heart remembers.

I am swallowed, still, by your ocean, lost, still, in your maze. I don't trust a human soul. I don't want the way I used to want, with waves, with storms, a want that was unstoppable. I don't chase the way I used to chase. Everything within me is different, tainted. No matter how beautiful my life is, I still see ugliness in the mirror. No matter how safe my home is, I still shake with fear at night.

I may have left you, but you never left me.

Try to Fix Me

Put some poison in the teacup. Sew my lips shut and contain me in shoeboxes. Show me the time capsules and watch the regrets flow in sweat. Detox me in the sauna of stability and reality from all these intoxicating things I've done. Help me forget the hole in the wall. Help me forget how to breathe. 

I'm trapped in time, always counting down the days. Help me forget how to count. Trap me here, right here, in this sixty seconds. Teach me how to sit still. I never did learn. 

I spend my words like Monopoly money. I don't even care if you're listening, honey. 

Self-Medicating

I ushered in a new love and brought it to my kitchen table. I reasoned with it and nurtured it, and threw the old love out, with pictures set on fire and love letters torn apart. I picked up all the pieces and felt the salve of something solid. I breathed in ash and smoke of burned bridges and did cartwheels through the soccer field. I micro-derma-fucking-brased my soul. I tried it all, sleep and sad poems, TV and toast, pills and post-war memorials, but Lord, I never got the pain to go away. 

A song's chorus

You said you loved me, but I know you lied

You don't choke out the one you wanna make your bride

You don't pummel her soul just to keep up your pride

I think of you often just to justify it

Just to justify all the times I tried

Speaking Sweetly

Speaking sweetly to me with that gap in between 

Your top and bottom teeth

Singing slowly in your sleep

Waves breaking on the long black beach

Holding gently the things that stick to your palms

Holding tightly the things that refuse to stay still

I've always had a harem of demons in the back room

Always had a whiskey-strong will

Never have I ever had a never like this

Never again, never before, never stretched out around us

The numbers turn to nonsense 

In a wonderland of whispers

351 days until I pose for all the pictures

All 351 lined up to be flogged into permanence

No one trained us for this

Turn up the volume and sleep turned into this 

Turn into the veil and quietly burn in the furnace

How I Feel When I Look At You

It took the longest journey to find you here, the longest game of hide-and-seek played between me and my heart. It was all so treacherous, so disappointing. The broken dreams in my wake are many and ugly, speaking of scars I still have to look at and burdens I still carry, and I'm not even sure how I made it through. Something in me must have known I was waiting for you. And if I had to make every horrible mistake, if I had to sit in that pain, if I had to go through that train wreck over and over and over, I would gladly do it all again, just to end up in this moment with you. 

Getting back to normal

Things I could do to be Shelby again:

-Start writing that next great American novel

-Eat at diners

-Busk in Denver

-Go to dive bars on the weekends

-Dance to folk music with Paige 

-Do random cartwheels 

-Take long drives

-Take long walks

-Drink more cappuccinos

-Get more tattoos

-Invest in more artwork for the apartment

-Go to art galleries

-Go to farmers markets

-Go to the Brass Armadillo

-Go to Two Rivers

-Sing in the kitchen

-Keep dyeing my hair a new color every five minutes
-Read Beat poetry
-Eat fast food in the parking lot

Unicorns and my Boyfriend

Never had I ever had no doubts, not a single one to speak of. Not before it was you that I saw with every blare of that alarm clock, the annoyance of being jarred awake now smoothed into bliss by your eyes in the morning, by you saying "Hello" like we're meeting all over again.

I never knew this happiness existed.

It's almost mythical, almost unbelievable, justthisclose from being as unreal as a unicorn. I never knew it was possible, never knew it was feasible, to feel so alive, to keep so warm, to be so safe. I miss you the moment you walk out the door, and rush to you like a kid the second you return, and never get tired of a single mundane moment, and never get over that look that you're giving me. You protect me from the weather, from the constant wildfire, from the blaze in myself, from the embers in you. You protect me with your yeses and your nos and your never agains, with the phone calls you refuse to take and your simple resolve to keep us alive. 

I don't deserve a single ounce of it, but I'll never stop fighting to keep it here. Never. 

Don't Think Of Me

Think of me between Kerouac's pages. Think of me on the corner of Colfax and Broadway. Think of me in every Village Inn you enter.

But don't think of me when your hands hover over the camera.

Don't think of me in the canyons, or when you stick your thumb out in the dust of the highway. Don't think of me when your sun is rising as mine sets on the other side. Don't think of me as you wander, chainless, freeing us mere mortals around you with your oxygen. Don't think of me as you run to the shakiest ground, as you find the silent stars. Don't think of me.

Don't you dare think of me.
You have bigger fish to fry.

Where I once was in your story, that's where I will stay. Always elusive, buried in a book, stuck in a rut, with a ring in my nose and a song for you choking in my throat.

Think of me when you visit those days. Hold tight. And then,

let go.

You Can Try, But...

You can sit through hours of misery, or leave him alone to ponder his crimes. You can scream in his face until you're satisfied, or fidget quietly through the silence of a hundred long car rides. You can search his things for the evidence, or protect yourself from knowing any more than you already do. You can write him a thousand love notes, and reach for him in the dark, and celebrate all of his victories, and seal your lips at the sight of his faults. You can shake sense into him, hammer sense into him, slap sense into him, talk sense into him. You can talk all day and every tired moment of the night. You can talk while he's listening. You can talk while he's drunk. You can talk in a voice you no longer recognize. You can get tired of talking. You can work on yourself. You can wear on him. You can write down the rules. You can change the rules to guidelines. You can watch the guidelines fade into distant memory. You can cry, you can cry, you can cry until he can't stand the sight of you. You can both cry together, but it won't make a difference. You can move in. You can move back out. You can change your hair, your face, your standards. You can drag him to church. You can drag him to therapy. You can beat yourself numb, try until you bleed, break your bones just to make it work. You can lay it all on the line. 

You can walk away. You can close the door behind you. You can grieve and mourn and lose yourself again.

Do everything you can, everything he needs, everything in your power.

But make no mistake my dear - he will never change. 

Losing It

I'm losing it slowly, my grip on reality, thank you, oh chemicals, for making this so difficult. You've gotta love it, that high-low point, that confusion at the top, that distraction at the bottom, always biting at the diamond like an ass at a carrot, always so stupid and unable to bear all these shiny little runners in my periphery, always just ahead and to the side of me, never in my reach no matter who is holding me. Everything's so pretty when you can't afford it, and everything's so perfect when it isn't yours, and dissatisfaction used to suit me just fine, but grown ups can't wander the way that they try. I'm falling on pavement, over and over, a ragdoll dropped from the thirty third story, the sight of me gory, no guts and no glory, just stuffing and emptiness and some kind of agony, this medicated numb just might be the death of me.

Nothing Makes Sense: a rant

I woke up in a fishbowl, I woke up in the wind, I woke up in a cage next to the only one I wanted. I fell deep into lithium dreams, I fell into the waters of my mind, I swam and swam until I had no more strength, and then I woke up in a fishbowl. 

I can't explain the way it works, the smoke cloud blurring my vision every moment, the time ticking by in unreality, eternity and infinity flowing like carbon monoxide, poisoning me at my deepest, I just can't breathe like this anymore. There's no one to understand me, no one to walk through this with me, the forest dark and lonely, the metaphors tired and cheesy, the English language incompetent to describe, impotent in its vocabulary, and I just can't try to a explain this anymore.

I'm ranting and I don't care.

It feels like I'm thirsty but there is no water. I'm thirsty for reality but I just can't touch it. My feet hover constantly, two inches above ground, and how I long to feel something solid under me, but all I feel is air. 

Something is amiss and I can't fix it. Something is broken and neither can you. Everything is nothing when we're swimming in oxygen. Nothing makes sense when you live in my skull or love in my rib-cage. Nothing.

Nothing. 

The Fire Won't Burn Me Now

The fire in the coat closet of my mind has become too wild to contain. Hungry for more than moth balls and faux fur, it laps at the walls and singes their white into a toasted-marshmallow shade, filling up my skull with the burning of matter, eating up instincts and disfiguring the paths my thoughts walk, charring flowers and incinerating gardens, greedily spreading itself out like a rising inferno-tide, hurling things across rooms with the full force of its desire. I have meditated in the middle of this metaphor before, swallowed alive by the insane flames of my neurons, falling in ashes back to the ground, floating, cremated and free, but here, this time, it hurts, but it never scatters me; it chokes, but refuses to take me completely, to make me disappear.

The Other Side of Wreckage

The wolf on my finger is fading, and the pain is turning to grey along with it. The hatred I harbor, I try to put to death, but my heart never sleeps and my mind grips too tight to

just

let

go.

He was a fire, a beautiful act of arson that incinerated all the good in my being and burned the bridge along with me. But after the carnage, there's room for new things to grow. The ecosystem of the spirit slowly wakes from the ashes and rises from the charred floor. Shouldn't I just be grateful that he gave me the chance to begin again? 

I am grateful, but the scars still run red. I work to forgive the matches and the gasoline, but pointing fingers is easier than saying "Go in peace." 

I found love on the other side of the wreckage, and in my deepest burns, I still hope he finds love, too. 

The Last Word on the Matter, a spoken word poem

The worst days of my life were spent in that apartment, locked up in a prison trying to run away from it, worshipping the ground you walked on, but you were hollow, giving me those icy looks so hard to swallow, refusing to touch me even when I scooted toward you, losing out on moments I just wanted you to share too. The baby was kicking, but I felt so lonely, every night I was just wishing you'd roll over here and hold me, but your brain was broken, the baby wasn't even yours, you felt like a child going through a divorce, not ready for the ring that I tried to throw you into, and the venom in my words wasn't really meant to hurt you. You ran to the bars and the women just to escape, your girl was at home but you told her to just wait, things will be better when the baby gets here, and things were better, but I never got over the fear. The silence you cradled, into the TV you stared, I handed you a plate but your appetite was never there. You were doing me wrong, behind my turned back, and when the truth came out, I lost the sanity I didn't have. No matter how you said you'd make it up as the years passed, you never did stop acting like I was a pain in your ass. I never forgave you anyway, and I should have tried harder, but in the end I wanted clarity for me and for my daughter. Maybe breaking promises is never really okay, but I still feel justified in walking away. It feels like I'm dreaming 'cause he loves the way I need, and I hope you find fulfillment out there wandering the streets. 

Two Days, or, One Simple Sentence to Explain How In Love I Am

My feeling that he was everything I needed encapsulated in one body was completely confirmed by a series of forty-eight hours in a row that I tragically spent without him. 

Our Second Date Was At a Hardware Store

On our second date of sorts, we wandered the hardware store and talked about countertops. We agreed that we liked the black granite. At the sight of the price tag, of course, he said, "So we probably won't be getting this for our FIRST home, but you know...someday."

And he meant it.

What affect could I possibly have, what spell did I unknowingly cast, that he would be possessed to say these things so soon? He kissed me in the lumber aisle and bounced my daughter on his hip through power tools, with every movement rearranging my thoughts, with every word renovating the interior of my mind. What did I do to deserve this remodeling? It came at a high price, but his words sanded away my anxiety, and built my trust in humanity from the ground up. An expensive feng shui of the head was occurring as we wandered up and down, and I listened.

"We're GOING to have a bath tub like this," he said.

"How do you feel about crown molding?" he asked.

Our second date. He was completely serious.

And in the middle of this imaginary home he was building with his lips, in the center of our total insanity, I finally, FINALLY felt safe.

Buried

I can't do this anymore, this feeling of the wrong place, fitting myself into a coffin and crawling underground. I'm tapping at the lid, frantically ringing the bell, but no one in this whole damn town has a shovel. My home is in the blue sky, underneath the fishbowl, feeling like a speck of dust so far away from anything, but so close to the infinite, wrapped around providence, staking everything I have on getting out from underneath the earth where they put my bones. Crushed by confusion and the madness that ensues when you lose love and find it again within a two week period, rattling my cage bars and wishing I could see stars, nobody can hear my voice, it just won't carry far enough.

Always Turning to Salt

I use the word nostalgia as though it were a conjunction, threaded throughout every poem, every line dripping in it, if not subtly, repeated like it's cheap to say it, the word itself and the idea too, completely overtaking everything I write or do. And I live in a room with it, imaginary, sitting in the cheap Motel 8 of my mind, the boarding-house of memories, the birthplace of many and all regrets, and I lay in my bed and smoke despair, wondering how I got from here to there. I watch the telly, the history channel, it speaks to me soothingly and reminds me how I got here. The year is 2010 and I'm wandering the halls of a psychiatric ward that came highly recommended. It's 2006 and the summer is so warm, the streets of Paris are so dirty, my best friend just moved to Tennessee. It's 2013 and I'm holding my newborn daughter in my arms as she needs and needs and I give and give, wanting nothing more than for her to stay needy and small. The scenes blur through on the television, hazy through the static of forgetfulness and lost detail, and there is an earthquake in Nostalgia every day. This living in the past, Lord it's just not sustainable, my walls are crumbling and the TV reception keeps getting fuzzier. I'm lost as to how to stop using that N word, lost as to how to stop missing those miseries, embellishing and sugar coating a past in which I never really lived, always looking backwards, turning to salt over and over, always living in this room. The door locks from the outside, and I never thought to ask who had the key.

Her

A slice of soul is missing here, a piece of darkness, like black glass against the sand, like night-times unshakeable but lost, like a past left behind but remembered. A thing that I love is separate from me, a spirit-child, a drunk friend, left to gasp for air at the New Mexico border, struggling to breathe on the SoCal shores, and I can't bring her back without going to get her.

I have been missing her, her of the smoke clouds, she of the random road trips, lady of the backpack, belonging everywhere and grabbing at everything, the pen in her hand a torch to light the way. She lies dying in a garage in Durango, in a shady hotel in the Gas Lamp District, those places where I felt so close to her, dying to do it all over again, but I don't know how to pick up the pen, and I don't know how to let her in.

I've been writing about not writing for a year. I am withering now, and I need her.

Random Car Ride Poem

What is life? This existentialist null-shit, I can't handle the voices all getting quiet in my head. You're sharing your soul with me, daily exposing, ripping tissue paper open like a Christmas morning monster, and I am rubbed raw by the newness in texture, the fabric of something I asked for in sincerity but didn't understand. These jeans are too tight. 60 degrees in February. My thoughts ramble on like a flow I can't control, nothing is everything and the mundane becomes my light, and there lies my fear, when the chaos subsides, I want the storm to come back and swallow me again, so that I don't have to look in the mirror.

13 Words That Say It All

I fell out of the whirlwind and into faithfulness.

And I'm not sorry.