intellectual properties

(keeping the door open)

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A  joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of it’s furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

–Rumi

what do women want?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

–Kim Addonizio

(thx Holly)

once again

stomped and dreamed

splashed and shadowed

glide trip bounce dive grind float laugh

soaring high above the trees in starlight

sneaking under blackberry brambles in pitch black liquid darkness

tanned and de/hydrated

starving and satiated

wet skin scrubbed clean with sand

the train rumbles by and the music goes right through you

joy so alive it feels like dying

rapt in love

wrapped in dust

swallowed and born

again

i sing the body electric

notes this morning

i closed the laptop and sat for a moment breathing deeply

tying to keep the tears from coming

- i am fine.  this is a external problem. do not let yourself be affected. -

i have not cried about this yet, i don’t think

but suddenly this morning was the first morning i really started to feel like a martyr.

because…..why? why am i allowing this in my life?

staring at the books every day

i now have a lot of empathy for everyone who struggles to pay the rent and bills.

the stress can drive you to do things.

.::.

as i pedal past the deliverymen, construction workers, office workers

going about their days in the sterile office park

the 3 dorky guys in suits who walked against the light

right in front of a HUGE piece of construction machine driven by a mustached worker in a hard hat

as i pass i briefly see inside their heads

all of the things weighing on their minds

their children, their dogs, their houses, their bosses, their jobs, their wives, their mothers

and realize

every human is a microcosm of the universe.

mornings that bring this kind of revelation in the mundane make me feel like i’m flying.

.::.

i like clean-shaven men in black suits, white shirts, collar open.

.::.

minutes later in the park i am coming up behind a hip/pie/ster couple

walking separately, the woman in front of the man

the man, in white jogging pants and a hoodie, waving his arms, walking erratically

the woman, in a sweater and skirt and brown cowboy boots

and he is yelling.

as i pass i look over at her and she lifts her face and her curly brown hair falls over large brown eyes that remind me of the girl from Amelie

she is maybe crying, but she doesn’t look scared so i keep going

and then i hear him say, angrily, “you’re fulfilling your own prophecy!”

49 square miles

a local SF handbag company, 49 Square Miles (referencing the commonly stated area of the city of SF, which is also referenced by the name of the magazine “7×7“, but is actually not quite true), recently had a campaign wherein people were to submit poems of exactly 49 words about San Francisco and post them to the 49 Square Miles facebook page. the prize? a gorgeous $650 leather hobo bag.

like many a young teenage girl i wrote lots of poems in my journals when i was young, and had to write poetry for a number of my poetry literature classes in college. but i was always embarrassed by my attempts at “real” structured poetry, and so if you look back through my “not poems” category here on this blog, you’ll see that my style of “poetry” is very unstructured, free form, and does not follow any of the traditional elements of poetry (meter, rhyme, form, etc.). it’s just a style of writing i use when i want to be obscure, or am finding something difficult to express in complete sentences, or when things are more sensory than logical.  i don’t generally think of myself as a poet.

so i did the challenge not just because i have a thing for leather hobo bags but because i liked the idea of having the extremely bounded challenge to see if i could come up with anything good within the parameters. it lasted a month and you could enter as many times as you wanted. i entered 5 times. i am not going to republish the 5 poems i submitted here, because, it turns out, i am (still) a terrible poet, but all the entries are here.

so i was HUGELY SURPRISED to learn that I WON! *so excited*. you can read my winning entry here.  thx @49squaremiles!

string theory

an often overlooked positive aspect of those who are “high strung”

is that they feel more vibrations than those with lax strings.

i feel the metal in the table quiver;

in fact, i swear i can see it on a bright summer day.

waves of energy hit me like a rainbow of infinite gradients,

coming from you, from everything -

the long deep loud tones rumble through,

the high tight quick ones are difficult to grasp;  you have to concentrate.

easy to overwhelm,

the cacophony so blurred, a tornado of offerings, a loss of control

leads to overload. freakout. shutdown.

but sometimes sitting on the edge of a riverbank,

the rush of cold water over rocks stirring a cold wind along the surface,

feeling every rustle of green leaves

and the every-so-slight changes in sunlight temperature coming through the sky,

it is revealed as a gift.

alignment

i am.
i mean:
i know.
i think too much about it.
i do.

and all of the things….

who are you next once you’ve metamorphosed a dozen times already?

i went to yoga tonight and my mind was racing during meditation
but i think it was OK;
i thought a lot about things that make me feel good
as i twisted my body into alignment.

even the fact that it (everything) is so much harder now at 33 than it was at 23:
i had an ok reflection on that.
mostly: you can come back, baby -
rock and roll never forgets.

i am only coming through in waves

the approximate scale is 15 to 30:
a nice-looking spectrum in its duplicity,
but there’s a lot of room in the middle.

my right arm is barely alive.
one of my least attractive personality traits
is that when i’m in pain i whine.
how much does it hurt?
i don’t know if i have a low threshold for pain or for complaining.

sailing through the wet-green and foggy-blue,
today is not the first day i wished my bike commute was longer.

doctor, my eyes

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?

–jackson browne