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.