davka: deer girl medicine

Frida Kahlo Mermaid

2012-02-06T22:29:00.005-05:00

don't wanna spend another day here

2012-01-16T00:04:00.010-05:00

that final stop at the end of the world
where the sun melts my spirit and my crazy
notions of eternity
all over the ocean horizon line.
the cliff could be suicide could be crying
could just be sleep and diary and a snorted blue

off the fallen rearview mirror
as the fog bank's fuzzy horizontal
meets my heretofore life like a faded slash
across the word love to make truth of the "like." Correct me

if I am wrong, but you were too high to remember
me singing Smokey Robinson
while slow dancing your sick body across the dirty laundry
and licked stamp bags
on your mother's floor
and you were child like and smiling
and I was trying to keep you alive
because the dose was too much and the love was too big
and your eyes were too blank for any of it to survive
if it fell asleep for even a moment and I didn't

but I do and I don't but I do
and I couldn't anymore, but I did
because you asked me to, because you needed me
because I knew the words
and I knew you
and I meant it all: my lips on your neck
my unwitnessed tears, my most perfect
private queen cry unheard
and our sad desperate onebody reflected black and grey
on the glass of the big screen
like some silent old reel
because even when it happened it wasn't,
but I grabbed you and said
take up your bed and walk
and when you stumbled I sang
something painful on purpose,
and put us into the akashic-
the lovers poorly
decoupaged over the falling tower,
a tarot and a flaming heart, all for you who never

loved the life saving serendipity of shed diamondback skin
left lying on the dirt of the could-be cliff
under the front tire at the exact moment I stopped,
three thousands miles away and I said it still won't be enough
but I can't jump
because if a lover
falls into the sea and no one is there to hear her
she doesn't live to tell somebody, anybody
that we had this one, this one
really beautiful moment.

who knows

2012-01-04T06:07:00.004-05:00

dream that i'm kissing a girl who turns into a jock
and i say no, but he doesn't listen.
then everything shifts to a police station that is a principal's office
and they're handing me a rape kit
which is a questionnaire drawn by a child with crayons in sloppy colors,
big swoops and circles and stick figures: a woman's body all weird and wrong
by some kid who couldn't know better.
I wake up and I don't know what it means, won't ever,
but wow, really, crayons?

The Problem With Breaking Up With A Rich Boy is a Joseph Cornell Box

2011-12-16T00:00:00.009-05:00

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is

that he brought you into a new world, safely by his side.
He said she is mine and so is all of this, for a limited time,
it can all be yours. Like the Last Temptation of Christ,
Savior and Satan on a hill, which one is which,
we both know one owns it all and one doesn't have shit,
but I cant claim Grace because I didn't say no.

I said oh, yes please.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
a Joseph Cornell Box.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
a catolgue in the mail six months later
full of beautiful things you want, but you can never have
and it has both of your names on the address label.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
an oil stain on my favorite dress
and welfare offices in my dreams
and his mother painted and framed all over the walls,
healthy and free, while mine was in a psych ward
or watching tv in a trailer

on a couch shot up with cigarette holes.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
the way I said to him, your mother is beautiful,
and he agreed and called her the Earth Mother
but didn't say it back to me

while I fingered her crystals and smelled her white sage
and prayed at her altar covered with paid for Grace
gilded in gold and layered in glass
of pique du jour stars like delicate lace
of infinite good luck, chance,

and zeros in sixes
and I say, so is mine, she is just a little polluted.

And what is Pique du jour anyway?
Who knows such things? Who owns such things?
Who ever heard of it until him?

Who has so many oil painted portraits

hanging on the walls? Jesus, what does it take

to get a six year old kid to sit still

for so long? Someone in my family

once got a charcoal caricature done in New York

on the streets from someone for a few dollars.

The problem of breaking up with a rich boy is

that his mother owns two original Joseph Cornell boxes
because his family is old, old money
and his grandmother owned an art gallery
and they have two, he mentions modestly
while you're safely by his side at the MoMa.

He tells you about his grandmother.

He says his cousin is making a film about her.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
that this movie will be made and you will see its name
all over the marquees when you walk down the street
carrying a picture of your own grandmother, may she rest in peace,
and you'll wish you had the money to make a movie about her life,
the big breasts of lived-through hell, ever-comforting flesh,

the bingo and the babies,
the Trail of Tears velour picture above the old organ
she taught you to play before she gave you canned chicken noodle soup
with stale crackers when your mom and dad were away

always working.

Her husband lost his fingers in a mine explosion
when she was a waitress at the racetracks

and she had no extra money and no extra time

for things like fine art
but she had enough heart to organize a theatre troupe

of poor little miners' kids
singing Mickey Mouse club songs to old people

all over those company patch-towns along the Monongahela.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
a Joseph Cornell Box. His mother has two

and Christie's Auction House called her
and appraised them at three million a piece

and you were so shocked
with the unimaginable number,

that could-save-the-world kind of wealth
sitting in storage, so you made nervous jokes,

is this the Cornell box, you asked

holding up the tissue holder on the back of the toilet,

because, god damn, who has that much money

and who was Joseph Cornell before him
and who is Jospeh Cornell after except for him and always him
and you need that beauty just as much as anybody,

you need the surprise of birds happy behind glass

and ice cubs that never melt

and worlds beyond your own always within reach.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
he couldn't imagine you and never saw you

and you never saw him
because you couldn't get past the rich to the boy

who needed love like anybody does. You loved him so much,

but always hated him some and he knew it.

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is

that paper birds can't break glass

and they certainly can't fly

and Christie's said the Paul Klee needs a frame

and your mother is full of shit

and so is mine

and it's true that I never respected you,

but I saved strands of your hair all the same

and I may not have money

but I have dirt under my nails

and that time on the hill?

I was just being polite,

playing the part.

I didn't want any of it.

Handmade Crusade

2011-12-13T05:56:00.002-05:00

I've started a new crafting blog. There will be personal stories and pictures of my creative process. Tutorials. Features with other artists. Interviews. Gemstone profiles. Give-aways and so much more. Follow, subscribe, and stay tuned.

Handmade Crusade

Frida Kahlo Mermaid

2011-11-27T20:31:00.005-05:00

Frida Kahlo Mermaid by Deer Girl Designs

See more pictures here.

where toward

2011-11-27T00:15:00.002-05:00

language is what makes us human, she said. having our hearts broken is what makes us like god, she didn't.

African Coin Bib

2011-11-14T15:46:00.002-05:00

See more pictures at Deer Girl Designs

Ne Hwas

2011-11-07T19:04:00.003-05:00

See more pictures of Ne Hwas at Deer Girl Designs.

amethystos

2011-10-30T02:38:00.009-04:00

In the dream, he's no good,
but gorgeous.
He's got his eyes on some other girls,
the blondes with poker straight hair
and go-fish minds.

I'm stuffing my curls
under a hat,
and pushing my Pynchon into my pockets
as he buys me drinks,
one after another,
but they never arrive.
In this dream dive

half on land, half submarine-
the world ending all around us,
the bartender is a butch and weathered Artemis
in an orange hunting vest,
with a wink
handing me coins of Amethyst.

tell ourselves to forget

2011-10-03T03:30:00.007-04:00

At 5 am, a pen rolled off of my bedside table and woke me up.

Good thing it wasn't a crucifix, I thought, that would have been a bad sign.

I sat up and saw that the sunlight was so rich and bright at that hour and I told myself I should wake up this early more often. I then realized that the sign was probably that I should be writing more. This made me nervous. I wished for a fallen crucifix. I'd rather stay haunted, I suppose. I woke up my lover and told him what happened. He smiled.

"It's a sign," he said, "you should be writing more."

Ah, what a sign! My mind bursts with the joy of wanting to write. Why have I been so afraid? What was the point of surviving all of that if not to tell the stories of those that didn't make it, of all the love and knowledge we gathered in the darkness?

Suddenly, there is a rainbow on my wall, the early morning sunlight refracting from the mirror. I wave my hand and let the colors dance on my skin. I pull a strand of pyrite beads from the pile of assorted pretty things I keep near my sleep. The gold shimmers. I lift my lovers hand to see the prism fill the creases of his palm, a well wish for his destiny. He moans and pulls it back. I spend my morning finding the rainbow and losing it, putting things into its path, like my breasts, Ganesh, the cat. I play with it then watch it go. I don't write a thing.

dream

2011-10-02T10:11:00.003-04:00

we were in a city of desperate light,
diamond district, playing dead-
we pretended to know the words
and prices, made up accents
and eccentricities and said
we were there to buy everything.

They believed us, but we passed through
with natural light, born this way,
shine, shine and holes in our shoes,
to sleep on garbage
by the sea where we cooked rice
and memorized bukowski.

things as they are

2011-10-02T09:52:00.001-04:00

Survivor

2011-09-12T13:43:00.005-04:00

Earthen containers of rouge, fifty years and older.
I touch some to my cheek
as you dig through the dust to find the picture:

Your grandmother, by the beach, the blue
numbers inked into her arm as she held you.
A family of dozens of sisters and brothers on both sides
murdered down to two
who found each other in the ruins
and made one who made you.

Under the full moon in Humaliwo
the pacific thunders, waves against the rocks,
you say, just imagine

It has been this way forever,
the push and pull, the power
to wear mountains down to sand.
The strength to survive.
The soft blanket she made
feels so safe, like an angelic
wing, it covers my shoulders and up
around our bodies
as I blow you and the sea
lions bark somewhere.

This was not supposed to be, you
were not supposed to be here,
I think as I pull you closer and feel
the power of her life
in your muscles and moans.
That force turns sand back into canyons,
brings starving, broken bodies back from the abyss,
brings babies and more babies
from the death only equation.

This moment, you say,
is what she survived for.
You smile
just like her.

Proverbs 31:13

2011-06-20T04:43:00.006-04:00

Sorry about the lack of writing. I've been keeping my hands busy to quiet my mind. You can enjoy my poetry of wire, chain, and stone over at deer girl designs.

"She works with her hands in delight."

in our hearts they are staying there

2011-04-23T20:11:00.006-04:00

pour a little salt we were never here

"There are wounds in our hearts and they are staying there," Barbara wrote to me once, "Promise me you will be safe? Promise me you will not hate. Trust me, I know what I say."

She did know. She grew up during the Yugoslav wars on a borderland between two warring people that were, the day before, neighbors and friends, and the day after, cutting off each others' heads and setting all that they shared hatefully ablaze. As kids, they used to count the seconds between the lights in the sky and the sounds of the bombs, like we counted the lightning and thunder. She said after the war, when the smoke cleared and the minds settled and the insanity had calmed into a regret heavier than the ocean, the neighbors came back over with freshly baked bread and no words for sorry. Barbara simply walked upstairs into the bedroom she shared with her sister and started to put away her dolls. Such a little girl, yet she just knew it: her childhood was over.

So many things she witnessed then stayed with her, gave her such a heavy melancholy. When she became sick, she told me she just knew it was because she let that sadness stay with her, she didn't fight hard enough to transcend it. I told her this was not true, that she could not blame herself. I wanted to say if anyone was to blame it was the corporations that poison our planet and are never held accountable for their mass murders. I wanted to say this just as I want to say it now, but it's so much easier to be angry at oneself then to fight the entire world.

She was sad. Often. But this melancholy came as a natural response to the most open heart, the bravest soul, and an energy so attractive and kind, you always wanted to be near her, to cry to her, to have her on your side. She was one of the enlightened ones and I am not just saying that because she's gone. I always knew it, rebelled against it, even hated it sometimes, just like some people hate it in me. But her heart, what a gorgeous heart. What a painful thing to have a heart that huge. It's a splitting sound similar to the feeling of fingers tearing into the flesh of a coconut or a mango, something you want so badly your mouth is already watering when you begin to rip into it, but this ripping comes from the inside out, trying to break free and be in the world whole- God or Love or Some Terrible Glitch that meaninglessly and mistakenly makes some of us so cripplingly sensitive while others can watch all of the horrors of the world without wincing. It hurts to carry that splitting fruit inside of you. But, Jesus, what a beautiful way to be in the world. Barbara knew she could go at any moment and with that knowing, Barbara planted flowers and wrote to friends asking about our lives and fears and she refused medicine and chemo because she accepted death and wanted to be fully awake for it.

It's hard to believe I will never see her again. I wanted to tell her so many things, to see how we turned out as mature women, no longer teenagers. One of the last things I received from her was a letter that read, "Sweetheart, are you happy? Talk to me. I am here for you and always will be. I love you so much. I know I feel you and I know I can understand you."

I have been reading that over and over again. She loved me so much. She loved me so much. See? She said so. She loved me so much. So much. I was loved in this single speck of a life amidst aeons of stars and lives, I was so loved by her. And there will never be another love like it. She did understand me and that is so rare. Now she is gone and I don't know what to say except I want to wear those words of love like a badge of honor as I walk through my own life to say to anyone who cares, she loved me.

We went to the prom together in suits. We sat on the huge stones of the Széchenyi Chain bridge throwing rose petals into the Danube under the huge stone lions that looked so angry but couldn't speak and she told me that the legend says that the man who made the bridge made a bet with his life that it would be flawless and, so, had to jump to his death when it was discovered that the lions had no tongues. Imagine being that full of lion rage and not having the tongue it takes to scream, I said. She remembered that later and said that's how she felt about her cancer.

Someone mentioned time travel today and everyone talked about where they would go if they could. I thought of my Barbara. I thought of being a teenager so young and naive and full of hope and ideas with my Barbara in a country that, to me, seemed, like the land I grew up on, so frozen in time in the most beautiful way. I remembered us sharing an apple in the gypsy markets as we walked through the chickens and swishing, colorful skirts at dusk swapping stories of our childhoods. She told me about dancing to a frenzy of broken dishes in candlelit bars during the rolling blackouts of the wars and I told her about baseball and spin the bottle and bonfires in the woods. I remembered watching a Romani boy taking his cows home on a long country road we were walking on and seeing the dust they kicked up with their hooves and Barbara said that the word for the dust that the cows kick up on their way home at night in Romani is the same word for twilight. I remember being so sad because a certain boy didn't like me and I cried in her lap on a crowded train full of women with baskets and babies wrapped in cloth and old men with handlebar mustaches in threadbare suits smoking cigars and she played with my hair and taught me the Hungarian words I needed to know to be angry, to be hurt. When we stepped off the train into the immense heat and witnessed together the fata morgana mirage that put an ocean of quivering light between the land and the sky she said it was something Hungarians loved and were so proud of and their beloved poet József Attila would walk hundreds of miles to see it and there it was, right there for us. We watched the sun go down behind the rickety wooden train-stop no bigger than a tool shed with the raised flag and a bare bench, surrounded by the the plains of tall grasses and draw wells. We stopped and waited for a shepherd taking his flock of sheep across the road. I thought of this today when my friends talked about time travel and I didn't say it, but I thought, I already have. And there is no other place I'd rather have in my history and no other girl I'd rather love in my heart, even if she is gone.

She is gone. Were we ever here? Were we ever girls riding on bikes to her grandmother's to eat soup and her grandmother greeted us bare-chested and smiling in the sun painting her fence and waving so naturally when a man came by on a horse and buggy and said hello- no one at all uncomfortable with an old woman baking her breasts in the sun? Did we ever sit at her big wooden kitchen table in candlelight poking holes into the ends of eggs to blow out the yoke and trace traditional patterns with wax on the surface before dipping them in paint, then peeling off the wax to reveal the finished egg? Did we then dress in white dresses with starched lace collars to give the eggs away to boys who came in suits to spray us with perfume as the Easter tradition dictated? Did I ever see that mean Hungarian teacher make her stand during the entire class because she was Serbian and made one mistake in her otherwise perfect grammar? Did we ever sit in the Chinese restaurant in Budapest when I decided I was a born-again Christian and Barbara said she just couldn't understand it, but she would give it some thought because I was the only one who understood her so if I believed it, there had to be something to it? And were we ever together laughing in the school yard the day John Lennon came on my headphones and the thrill of that music made me say to hell with being a Christian? Am I wrong in thinking I have experienced a lot more death than most people my age? If it's true, what does it mean? Why? Am I supposed to know something others don't? Will the deaths just keep destroying me until I am utterly empty and ready to give up everything I thought I cared about and walk into the desert to meet some burning bush? Or is it all just meaningless?

Barbara had bone cancer and thought it was her fault. She loved me so much. I loved her so much. That's what I am remembering and holding onto tonight. I can't even begin to wonder why someone twenty-eight years old and in perfect health suddenly got cancer and is now gone, her incredible future erased. My future with her erased. A future of showing off our babies and introducing our lovers and remembering together what it was to be girls together. If I think too hard about that, I may lose it. There is someone, something to blame and, even if I did know who or what, what could I do?

Tonight I'm in a rented room with crooked shelves and old lady decor and a blue afghan on a very small bed. There's a busy city outside and rain on the window. There is a cross-stiched pillow with a Dostoyevsky quote that says if we wish to seek God we should not look to the firmament but to the face of human love. And there is someone I love so very much up the hill that I want to hold on to and sleep next to, but taboos of breakups say that I can't even call him, that I no longer have a friend. There is no time for this kind of bullshit. But there are no lights tearing through our sleep. There are so many friends out there right now that I need to reconcile with, but we are not in the right consciousness and maybe it will never happen. Maybe it never happened anyway.

We think we have so much time. We think we know it all. We think we are just supposed to forget them, but I have never been able to forget even one. Not even one.

Come over. We are already dead. The world has already ended. What do you have to lose? Promise not to hate. There are wounds in our hearts and they are staying there. I know what I say.

Photo by Jamuna Cseh. "Csodálatos lány volt, csodálatos barátnő, csodálatos filozófus, csodálatos forradalmár, csodálatos küzdő, csodálatos teremtés! Minden pillanatot köszönök neked!"

Every Ho I Know Says So

2011-04-19T21:20:00.002-04:00

Brialliant! Important! Bravo!

Dolls

2011-04-18T02:35:00.007-04:00

My Etsy (Under Construction)

2011-04-11T17:32:00.003-04:00

My Barbara is dead. The darling of my soul is dead.

Isten veled Drága Barbarám. Én ezt még mindíg nem értem. Nagyon szeretlek.

Final Hour

2011-04-09T19:42:00.013-04:00

"Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don't study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield." - Toni Morrison, Beloved

River bottom. Chaparral as thick as barbed wire coils in wartime. A sign at the trailhead says that mountain lions linger in the bushes and stalk their prey. You are gone before you even know what hit you. O merciful pain, teach me the way to make it to the end of my life with integrity and strength. Lay it all down.

The horses and their riders want love. The lizards want to eat. The snakes want sun. The hawks want to see. I am all of these.

There is the sound of water somewhere over there, as sure as a promise you trust so innocently, a promise you have always trusted. The path is idyllic: tall grasses and white sage and wild medicine and oak trees and ant holes of swarming, swarming intention and, still, there is the grid of all the longing and ego desperation and creative play we have all made circling in and out of me and yet, when I blur my vision I can almost pretend I am alone here on earth.

There is this game I like to play when I'm alone walking down a beautiful path. I call it The Final Hour. I pretend I've just died and I am walking to my Eternity, my judgement, my ancestors, or nothingness. Or, I'm walking a gauntlet, proud and pretty like sad, sad Anne Boleyn, saying goodbye to the world, finally in good spirits, laughing to my confused ladies, I heard say the executioner is very good, and, anyway, I have a such a little neck. Looking around, no one understands my levity. No one is here. I have such a little neck!

I have from here to the water to make my peace with all that I have been.

The first time I played this game I was fifteen, tripping on acid in the Alleghenies with friends and lovers at dusk, walking to a waterfall where we could be naked, be young and crazy in safety. The fireflies were beginning to spark all through the darkness like the birth of the universe in fast foward and a friend said, see the fireflies? Pretend we are in a silent war and every light is a gun going off.

Another time I was twenty in Israel, walking down a canyon path at night toward a party in a hidden cave in the desert that merchant caravans had been using to sleep and settle their camels in for thousands of years. I walked with friends, drunk and locked in arms laughing, the jackals howling in the mountains and I said, hey everyone, pretend we just died and this is the road to heaven. We teased each other with sins and secrets, and said in several languages that we were gonna snitch, we were gonna miss each other, we were ready. We stumbled and passed the bottle around and everyone grew quiet, really there and really reckoning and then, a mangy feral dog ran up to lick our hands and we burst into laughter: Who was that? Virgil? Charon? Al-Buraq? How the hell did he get here? The dog wagged his tail and ran onward and we followed him to the party.

Alone on the path to the river. There is a bees nest alive and electric sounding in a dead tree. A desert stink beetle is so charming, making her slow and dignified way into the shade. She has such a little neck! Long legs and a black, shiny body. She pushes her ass up and does her signature headstand when I kneel down to see her. It's supposed to be threatening, the way she can spray me with something awful that smells so bad and can't be washed off, but I think it's how cute she looks when she does it that has gotten her safely this far. I laugh and walk away. I hope she makes it. There is a majestic great blue heron standing directly in the path and this reminds me of my S, source of so much suffering and pain, the quintessential love struggle of my youth, and how we laid down our swords and shields one day and stood together like the Rider-Waite Lovers, watching our first Great Blue Heron together. The storm of our incessant warfare was silenced under the awe of her gorgeous, almost prehistoric flight. In this Final Hour I have to answer for how I believed so innocently that that sensuous beauty brought us back together or how I simply love herons even if they have never loved me.

I love this world so much, even if she is dying. I love us all even though we are all profoundly wounded and each and every one of us is a survivor of abuse. I love us even when we act wretchedly. I love this world even though walking around within her, being her lady and knowing her fate, sometimes feels like mourning, no matter how sunny the day, no matter how delicate the lattices of silky webs spinning that sunlight into fractal patterns of rainbow mist after the rain. No matter how much she loves me, loving her feels like holding her hand in the hospital where she is dying of cancer. It feels like holding her hand as we walk her into the battered women's shelter. It feels like the wounded, difficult love I have felt for my own mother, battered by everything this world does to women, to creation, to the earth. I have from here to the water to reconcile that love, to feel it without fear.

Who is at the end of the path? God? Great Spirit? I cry and think that "God" can't even exist until we create it. If we want the universe to be composed of Love we have to believe it. I think I have from here to the water to really believe it.

A woman appears walking away from the water toward me. She is wearing a velour jumpsuit and gold bracelets, Dolce and Gabbanna sunglasses. She doesn't look wet. She doesn't look like she was swimming. She's on her cell phone. She doesn't notice me. She says, "Well, then, her soul will be happy because she will finally see that God is living inside of her and that's just the way it is."

She actually says this. I stop and look back. Was this a game? Did I imagine that? Her showdog is limping alongside her. It stops and sees me. I think we are thinking the same thing.

On the way back, after the water, the game over, I see my beetle smashed on the trail, still moving. Who did this? Who was so careless that they didn't watch their feet, didn't see her doing her own thing on the path, didn't delight in it? Was it the woman on the cellphone? How could someone spit such wisdom while being so damn self-centered, so unaware? I'm so angry. I'm so sad, but I can't be. I just can't be. I finish her off with my boot. My new lover is waiting at the gate and that's just the way it is. Nothing and no one is for keeps. I have from now until death to accept that.

And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things

2011-03-27T23:34:00.006-04:00

There's incense ash on the cigarette sitting in the abalone shell. There is a spine in the clouds that grows into a transparent dragon with a skull whose head is a bowl. She doesn't know if the bowl was carved in or if it was born that way.

She thinks the things of her mind are very beautiful. When her small hands bring that mind into material, she thinks it is very beautiful, so beautiful even her hands are beautiful. She could always make her own vision blurry and that's the way she sees into things. When the boys would play baseball when she was little, she would stand on the edge, staring at the chain-link fence with fuzzy eyes until the flat diamonds became living keltic knots breathing in infinite dimensions. That blurry vision trick worked like a charm at the beach or mall with the magic eye posters. She felt secretly proud when others couldn't see the dolphin in the blue and black static. She looks at clouds that way. Sometimes people. She thinks she has never known the feeling of someone looking at her that deeply, secretly seeing the dolphin jumping out of the water in the blue and black static.

There is a lot of ash in the abalone shell. White sage, the smell of blessing, sometimes begging. There are ashes of a name burned there. Sketches of a house and a happiness she burned there. All the things she hoped for, all the thing she had kept hidden. A picture she found in a magazine some months after the abortion. A little girl playing piano and again sitting on a couch, dark eyes that seemed to have been drawn in kohl on the pale, milky skin- exactly what they would have looked like combined. She offered candy and small plastic toys and flowers and hair-clips to that little girl for years. Her therapist said write all of the names and burn them. Burn the pictures. She is burning everything. She wants to burn a bridge there, but she may need it.

Last night a dream of his face so vivid. Just his face and her hands touching him. Touching like you would touch a face after a long coma sleep and you finally open your eyes. Touching like you would touch a face you loved for so long and were about to say goodbye to, forever. Touching with all the joy and pain of life in one touch. You remember the whisper, you are so beautiful. It was your voice coming from outside of you both, toward you from above you. It was your voice, so sincere and breathless. His face was illumined by the purest light- campfire light, fire in a barrel in an alley light. And that light, the softest of lights when your bodies were naked together in darkness and you played around with the lights like shy kids naked for the first time before you made love.

When she's not good with him, everything hurts. She almost forgets her beautiful hands. She almost forgets her wild hair full of knots and dead leaves captured in curls down to her ass when she was a girl. She runs to the bridge they built like a clubhouse with a secret handshake when they first decided to try and love, way back in the beginning when they were careful. A Hansel and Gretel together swearing right there on that bridge that they were gonna have each others' backs forever. She goes to that bridge because it's where they rested after running and it's where they felt safe after the burning. It's where they promised to always meet when things got shitty.

She's alone.

The poem in her notebook became a spine-dragon in the clouds, sketched sloppily in the center of the page. She said some poems are finished before they end. She's gotta go. She empties out the abalone, blows the stubborn ashes away, then spits on her shirt to wipe the inside clean. There, she smiles. There's your beautiful iridescene. The sun is a voice coming from outside of her, toward her from above her. The iridescence is always moving. The iridescence is why people love abalone. The iridescence is everything we want mirrors to be, always changing, no reflection.

The cloud is gone, the ghost of safety burned to death by fear. You scared shitless kids, you had it all wrong.

Poems and Other Objects of Sacred Escape

2011-03-17T16:51:00.003-04:00

My poem, "Ouroboros," has been published by Caper Literary Journal. Thank you guest-editor-poetess extraordinaire, Laura Davis, for all you do to keep beauty in the world via the written word. Check out the great writing and gorgeous artwork.

Love in the time of nuclear fallout,
Davka

Conquest, a dirty

2011-03-17T16:37:00.004-04:00

Love is all there is, she's saying and I'm thinking, well, I sort of agree, but I think she means romantic love in the follow-your-heart kind of way and I want something more radical, less jealous, something real and not the Freudian psychic slaughter houses we love to stay in. Let’s get this straight-

we fall in love because we are bored. We fall in love because we hate ourselves and we fuck to be another person, if only for a few moments,

I say to my best friend who knows I fucked both of her sons. It's a new

conquest, a dirty, abandoned swimming pool, a richie house for sell and an old lady asks us, the mother and me, as we sneak through the front gate, are we going to buy it, are we going to be the new neighbors? No way, we are just having a smoke in the back, we are stealing figs and pomegranates and left behind trash treasures, like a busted up, wooden hexahedron lantern I plan on sanding and varnishing to place a doll inside so she looks trapped

with origami blackbirds. I could be satisfied, if I lived in a world where birds had human heads or doorways appeared in mid air on the dirt path behind the goat farm, but I don’t, so I cope- I have opiates and benzos,

occasionally I have love.

the only thing left of him

2011-03-14T22:18:00.004-04:00

i found the grey hanes tshirt size medium

at the bottom of my closet

and remembered his chest

bringing it to life. i took out my knife.

his smell was gone.

i cut it to shreds, picked up the pieces

and began dusting my altar.

Detail a Day #16

2011-03-06T22:28:00.001-05:00

I will never see Basquiat dance.

2011-02-19T19:42:00.006-05:00

Believer says she had a dream of a soldier face-first in a creek. The creek became ocean, mad whirling, alive, and the soldier was still breathing. She ran in, unsteady legs, her skirt, white lace and crinoline, tearing and shredding against the fallen trees and rough rocks. A soiled bride, she decided to dive because this life was worth something beyond herself. She tried to pull him to the shore, but he said he wanted to swim, but he was too tired to try the distance. She said, no, look, it's only right there, you're so close you can almost touch it. The water was taking her down. The current was spinning her like a storm. The soldier was fighting his way out of her arms, but she loved him. Right when she thought they would perish together, right when she accepted that fate, bride on his funeral pyre, he started swimming. They made it. The scene shifted and she was Ananda Mai, riding a white tiger in the streets, peace and power so serene it was sexy, a face so gorgeous it looks ready to break from its lightness. She says the soldier was her husband, drowning, unable to see the shore, resisting love and it's ok he loves her, love I witness as abuse and irredeemable, but it's her life. I play my guitar under the explosive colors of the blooming apricot tree with soft pink flowers that stay for only a few days, give to something else, come back again a year later.

While fucking you I lean back and enjoy the picture show. My mind flooded with sensations and strange images : God, a black butterfly, wings of Chantilly lace, fluttering at hummingbird speeds, fifteen to twenty beats per second, fifteen to twenty breaths per measure, the not so happy, beautiful music of me and you and the solider, his last gasps are ours, the ones we are exhaling uncontrollably into the air, into each other's open mouths, invoking a protector, Oh god, oh god, god. Protection from what? From this pleasure that challenges your self-destruction, from the morning birds singing through the shutters, saying this is over, it's time to move on. You put your uniform on. I tell you the war is over. You say somewhere there is another one, waiting for you.

Ananda Mai, Ananda Mai, I'm of a different time, a different place. I don't want to save soldiers anymore. Is that ok? Can I live with that? Can I ride the white tiger through the streets in triumph anyway? Can the white tiger ride me in the city square for all to see, mythic beast sex so good she says, there is no god and the people see and say it's sick, but they don't understand. They can't. Can I be the white tiger, alone in the chaparral, one of a kind, no reason for being there, except to hunt and eat. Can my lion lay down with your lamb and can time stop there so I can stop wondering what happened.

I dream, instead, of a half blackbird half man whispering into my ear as I am bare-breasted on a long road, strapped with food and weapons and art for sale, not running away, but on my way, away from the last warzone to the next hope and I've got some soldier's skin made into socks because it's damn good insulation and it's a long, cold trek through the tundra and he wanted to die anyway and I knew I couldn't save him.

He said I was a monster. I said the gods of the old age are the monsters of this one. I say a lot of shit, but it's true- I'm wretched. I'm pure. I'm a good person. So are you. What's the point of fighting? Swim, swim to shore. It's all waiting for you there.

I can't dive in. I've wasted too many beautiful dresses. I can't be free where there is no forgiveness. I'm a mythical monster of gorgeous proportions. I'm a pathetic human being. I'm sorry.

Everything had to swim before it could walk. Every love ends ugly. We can't have it any other way. That's a hard sword to swallow.

Today I Come to You

2011-02-13T15:02:00.010-05:00

Santa Barbara, Saint Barbara, we lift our lighters up to you sitting outside of the Old Mission, smoking native blends, Saint Sad Not-a-Son whose head was cut off by your father's sword, but your storm-charming power saved an explorer from the angry Sea off the shore of this little city on the eve of your feast day and now your name lives forever, as forever as the Ocean and Orishas, not Oprah, who lives in these hills, she may pay for the air and the view, but you are ours, Santa Barbara, pray for us, Lady of Lightning, a candle for you from the Botanica Divina backstreet Santeria store, Chango and a found flower through a broken fence, an American sadhu in torn t-shirt and dirty toes sticking out of ancient Nike shoes singing Waylon Jennings by the port-a-john, the smell of piss, the power of money, the power of none, the singing kids with violins and crumbled change in a bowler hat on State Street where the designer heels march the Battle Hymn of the Rich on sandstone silencing earth silencing bones of the Chumash and all that was before these marble arcades and blast washed colonnades, you had nothing to do with this, Barbara the Saint, but I have a day- a Betsey Johnson dress and a blueberry smoothie, a picture smiling under lines of swaying palm trees in seventy something degrees and succulents everywhere and busking fiddles and a Chagall girl flying in starlight and two, yes, two different Salomes, one standing proud, one kneeling over John the Baptist's severed head, solemn, maybe sorry.

Dirty Girl Zine Issue #1

2011-01-26T14:47:00.004-05:00

"Dirty Girl Zine," is out! It's gorgeous and includes amazing writing and art by sex-workers. The contributors list includes many awesome essential voices, including mine. :) For more information click here!

Detail a Day #15

2011-01-12T05:04:00.003-05:00

the curves of the bottle.
amber whiskey on the rough
wooden table.
my hair in a herringbone braid.
the ink unfurling black
flames on the page.
the candle.

Detail a Day #14

2011-01-08T19:48:00.005-05:00

Mambo Sirene, Paper/Fabric Doll (For Bridget)

Detail a Day #13

2011-01-04T19:29:00.003-05:00

Raison d'être Necklace

A God That Steals From Us

2010-12-30T21:18:00.019-05:00

"Smile for all the people who love you and the people you love. You've got hugs and love coming at you every which way even when we're all farthest apart. No one can take that from us. Not even that god that steals from us. We got this. We know love." - Ryan Williams

Eight musicians, artists, beautiful wanderers and friends killed in New Orleans Fire.

All photos by Zsuzsi Matolcsy, Adam Staniszewski, and Ryan Williams, maybe others.

R.I.P Nurse Nikki and the other beautiful wanderers who lost their lives.

New Dollie: Not Yet Named

2010-12-12T03:21:00.007-05:00

Papier Mache, Fabric, Yarn, Acrylic. Stuffed with herbs I harvested in the mountains: white sage, black sage, canyon grey sagebrush, mugwort, spanish moss. Her brain is a blessed St Theresa of Avila medal. Her spine is a strand of cordage I made from Yucca on the Pratt trail. Her heart is a quartz crystal. I hand made her corset and skirt. All work done with reverence and love. Sacred.

2010-12-11T14:28:00.002-05:00

Mourning sister, you're in my heart
heavily seeping out of the candle dish-
red wax drips time, tragedy, big smiles
of sister giggles gone
ghostly blood onto the wooden floor.
I cannot imagine.

detail a day #12

2010-12-07T04:20:00.003-05:00

"Seven African Powers," votive candle found at Walgreens.
Bought it with my "crazy meds" and some batteries.
The cashier said, "Don't ever straighten your hair.
Your curls are gorgeous,"
as I walked out into an eyeflood of sun-
where the film means death or
transformation. I said
to myself somewhere this is December.

"It's a Good Day to Die"

2010-12-02T16:34:00.010-05:00

A very rich, very lucky, very privileged man I know here once updated his facebook with a quick and easy appropriation of Crazy Horse's famous battle cry, "Today is a good day to die." He meant meditation. All of his materialist spiritualist friends added on to the thread, yes, it's a good day to prepare for death, woohoo, let our egos die. It angered me. What did he know about death? What do any of us know, really, but what about taking time from your luxurious life to meditate really prepares you for death? During that same month that he had posted his proud battle cry, at least five of my friends were posting their own status updates mourning a murdered sister, an overdosed dad, a suicide of a friend from high school, a car crash, a father and brother killed in a coal mine. I couldn't and still can't totally articulate my anger, so I'll let Sunni Patterson do it for me. I posted this link on his facebook at the time, but I doubt anyone understood my point. The point I guess is that poor people, especially people under siege by occupying armies (including our own racist, murderous police state) face death daily in a much more real way than sitting on a plush zafu meditating and, baby, it aint always good, it aint always pretty, it aint always easy- and when you watch friend after friend die, a lifetime of suicides of the most perfect creations crushed under the weight of civilization's alienation and madness and beautiful magic friend bodies becoming visceral fleshy dying meat, well- it does something to ya. Something we will all endure sooner or later. So let it be done. Fall apart, feel it, it's really fucking terrible and there's sometimes no way around that reality. It's an initation into being human and until you've endured it a few times, you really have no clue what's going on and, as for me, I've never been one who's been able to intellectualize my way out of it, to say it's what the dead wanted, they're in a better place. Nah, we want to live and when that can't happen, something is terribly wrong and I let that take me under and in the underworld, much wisdom is gained, much compassion. So, today is a good day? Ok. Something real this way comes, I hope you're ready. Or, as my sister says, are you afraid- afraid to rage? "Rage against the dying of the light?" Are you afraid of where that rage and pain would take you? Many traditional cultures have a mourning practice of wailing, wailing, wailing. Where is the rage, the unfettered feeling, the wailing?

"Some day, you will ache like I ache." - Hole

Fan me/ Find You

2010-11-27T03:53:00.005-05:00

Become a fan of Davka DeerGirl on facebook! If only to make me happy..

here.

and then read, receive, see, and be

so many amazing things here.

The first one is please, the second one is thank you.

Palmface (Rant)

2010-11-22T23:03:00.005-05:00

There are some things that we just cannot stand to hear. For some people, it's fingernails down a chalkboard. For others, it's a car alarm, going on and on and on and on and sounding so useless and stupid and hysterical. I guess, that's something of what I hear when I hear dumb ass white people on tv or anywhere else saying that the word, "nigga," is the "n-word" and getting all up-in-arms about it like they actually give a shit or actually have any clue about anything. How can people possibly not understand the difference? I asked my twin sister this yesterday while watching an interview between a very dumb white talking head and a very articulate and confident (and might I add, fine as hell) Aaron McGruder, creator of, "Boondocks," where the woman said, "You use the N WORD on your show!!!!!" (She probably uses it at dinner, probably looks over her shoulder in her own damn kitchen, too, before she says it, out of habit.) McGruder responds with a smile, "No, we use the word, "Nigga." I never use the N-word on my show." And I love it that he doesn't waste breath trying to explain the difference to her and I love that his confidence and refusal to go into teaching her ignorant ass silences her and he is given time to speak.

Anyway, I am always just so dumbfounded when white people don't get the difference and I've always had this feeling that the difference makes white people very uncomfortable. Combine this with the common tendency that white people have of not shutting up to listen to how others feel about Difference and their own experiences, always trying to tell others how to feel, and ALWAYS insisting that their (white) feelings should be prioritized, well- you have a lot of stupidity going on. My twin sister succinctly summed it up and answered my question and, I think, really hit the nail on the head. "White people don't want there to be two different words. They don't want anyone else to own or liberate or deconstruct the word. They want the N-word to be the N-word only and always loaded and always theirs." I think she is right.

Not Even Poets

2010-11-16T23:57:00.007-05:00

-painting by Karo

It would be a lie to say I didn't feel it. The body remembers. My mom attempted suicide for the, maybe, tenth time on the two year anniversary of my grandmother's death and now that date, April 6th, is seared into my body's memory so deeply, my descendants' descendants will feel it. She had done it many times before, but that time, that was the worst time, the coma and intubation and ICU and cardiac arrest and two months straight living in a hospital praying and singing and losing my mind over her body time. That was the worst time of my life.

You somehow keep moving and it is astounding. You keep moving, but you're forever altered. Sometimes you're sitting with her and you just kind of zone out and watch her skin, her hands, her smile and you are sure she didn't make it and she is a ghost- that your prayer was answered and that was, give her back to me for just one day and suddenly you are seeing her as if you only have one day left with her and it's that day you asked for after you were sure she was gone and then your eyes are burning up with tears and love so intense, so huge, the heart can hardly hold it and you repeat Zelda Fitzgerald's famous card quote over and over again,

" Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."

Everybody is different, but for me, this mantra gives me comfort. It also terrifies me. How much can a fucking heart hold? Some people don't make it. Sometimes the cost is too high! Who can pay the price? The measurement might be greater than the sky, but sometimes it can be the size of a small, human fist and the muscles are just tired of fighting. I don't blame you.

Lover, don't be ashamed.

It's one line in a hook of a song I'm writing, sitting on my bed thinking of Ari when Carolyn texts me, simply, "Six months." It would be a lie to say I wasn't already feeling it. I was and I knew, although I didn't count the months, I knew the day. May 13th, 2010. I will forever remember the day in my body. I was reminded when I grabbed a coffee mug at the workshop that morning and it had the Starbucks Siren with her crown of stars emblazoned on the enamel. That symbol, that name will forever make me sick. It's where Ari went to do what he did.

Time can forgive all sins and so can I.

It's a breathless feeling. It's a life punched out of your gut feeling. It's a mindfuck feeling. It's a feeling of only being able to sit back and take it, life, death, and the irreversible fact that there is now nothing left to do. Your mind runs in circles so fast trying to figure out a way to call her, to tell her you love her, to say don't fucking do this, but it's done. It's done. And all you can say to the person who called to tell you is, "What?"

Stunned.

"What?"

And they repeat it a few times after a few whats because this exchange is almost scripted into our dna.

"Brandi is dead."
"What?"
"Brandi is dead. I'm so sorry."
"WHAT!!!"
"Are you alone? I am coming over."

No No No No No No No No No

You scream it with your whole fucking existence at an invisible Intelligence that cannot and will not bring anyone back. You say it to brace yourself against the soul splintering plunge into the mystery, the horror, the pain, the awe, yes, the slight awe that they are gone, that they have passed on to be in Eternity or Nowhere or Everywhere or you have no idea where. You are slightly jealous. You begin then to deify them. You begin seeing every memory you have with them, even the silliest ones. Blair Witch Project slumber party on Sandy's mom's couch eating pizza and screaming at the tv. The time he stood up in the booth and sat on the back of it in the restaurant out of nowhere to scare the punks at the table who were trying to start shit and when they walked away, confused, he smiled at you and said, "Just flip the script on em, Jessica." And how you loved that smile so fucking much. You remember every single moment in high relief. You see a video his girlfriend posts on facebook of him pushing her around in a stolen grocery cart through the labyrinth back alleys of Bloomfield and you can see they are both high as kites, but you're so happy to see his face, that smile, life. You realize they are gone and you're standing around the hole in the dirt staring at the hearse and his mom's knees buckle and someone catches her and your eyes roll shut and you cannot believe they are about to bring him out in a box and the Rabbi says he lost the fight and his older brother, crying, throws two packs of cigarettes into the ground and you haven't slept in two days, you were up all night making lanterns to put into the river, the Monongahela, that river by which you were born, and he's gone and they all light up like lost souls and swirl at one center point then float away and out of view and everyone is weeping and he is gone and someone says thank you for the ritual and "that's a down girl right there," which is something he had said about you before and you feel him everywhere.

Queen Tara, please take his pain. Drive all his monsters away so I can know it's safe to say goodbye.

Just words. Just a feeble prayer, song, whisper as your hand sloppily brushes the strings. Ingrid is a good woman. You meet her at rehab where you're visiting your lover and you're so happy she is there with him because she has so much heart strength. Tarot cards and smoking outside, she tells you that you and your lover better get moving, get over it. Her son killed himself. Damien. He was beautiful. She tells you details that you cherish now as sacred, secret knowledge, but your heart is torn to shreds and all your recently sealed wounds are open and weeping, crying, screaming with wolf's teeth and Kali's tongue. In a dream you are with Rick and his body is whole again and you are kissing him all over, all over, so happy to have his body whole again. Suddenly, he's gone and you are at his grave and you begin screaming his name. You look down the dark, Oak lined row of old headstones and see Anneliese Michel doing some of her six hundred a day prostrations that eventually shattered her kneecaps. How did she get into this dream? Where is Rick? He was just telling you the nurses are saying he has reached a plateau and cannot get any better and you were just about to tell him fiercly, "Fuck that. They also told me you were going to die and I didn't believe them then and I don't believe them now. You have to fight! God dammit, Rick, fight like hell!"

But suddenly he's gone and you're screaming and three angels approach on horses and they are invisible but wearing white robes so you can see their form and you are terrified, but love is greater than fear so you step in front of their flight and say, "Where is my friend?"

They are taken aback by your courage and they can see in your eyes you may be human, but you will do anything to have him back. Then an owl in the woods screeches and wakes you and you realize you're in your van sleeping in the mountains and Rick is still in a nursing home in Pennsylvania and you're never going to be over it, but the heart is holding, holding on.

Deadly nightmares can't be whisked away by some human kisses on a very cloudy day. But your eyes were blue when I was telling you I'm fucking holding on til we all pass safely through.

It was a promise I made to him, Ari. He said give me some time, Jessica, just give me some time to straighten out my life. I told him he couldn't stay with me, but I loved him no less, but he walked out of my car and disappeared between the rowhouses looking so defeated, so ashamed. What if I had let him stay? What if I would have said yes and shot up with him when I could hardly get out of bed? What was I trying to prove in not falling apart with him? What if I would have pulled him into the van and headed west then, just one week before I planned on leaving. What if he would have answered my text that night he died, "Are you awake?" I texted him, "Are you awake," when they were just finding his dead body. His beautiful body. Damn, what a perfect creation he was.

How much can the heart hold? You tell me.

Ari was Sandy's best friend since childhood. We hold each other above the ocean crying so hard and we see Carolyn's painting and his face looks so real we both reach for it and think for a moment we can touch him again. Holding on to the sheets is another beautiful friend we lost, Sarah, Ari's girlfriend, my girl-crush coworker and confessional sister of the night shift, my friend- and her face is black to signify the haunting and guilt he felt, the guilt that eventually killed him. Sometimes the heart can hold too fucking much and it's always the huge hearted that die young, it seems. Makes you wish their hearts were built smaller or with more filters or less feeling or anything, but then, they would not have been them and you loved... I mean, you love them.

You keep loving them and talk about them and don't let words like death steal your love. This is all we can do. Hold on.

Adam, Brandon, Bobby, Creed, Brandi, Sarah, Ari, that girl who sat in front of me in science class in seventh grade and always looked so sad and then walked into the woods with her father's gun, all of those who can't hold on, and, now, this beautiful girl I have only known through the soft, sweet and gentle memories of a shared friend and pictures I saw where her soul was as stunning as her fair skin and powerful eyes- I am so sorry. I don't know what else to say except I'm so sad, sorry,

and still here.

detail a day #11

2010-11-14T02:51:00.007-05:00

for jyotika.

how can a body so small
hold so much light

goddess, it must hurt
to be such a fountain,
sprouting
a thousand
arms
to hold the world.

Or is it as easy
(and painful)
as pistil and stamen
saying, take
with whispering winds
or, I'm coming
to the Sun

I put my lighter up
for you, sweet sister
of sacred sound

cigarettes and mantras,
darshan of your fairy face
and crepuscular curls
of love and rage
keeping safe
the lioness inside
licking her babes.

love you to life
when I saw you die,
laugh, cry
and be reborn
in one instant
this soft morning.

detail a day #10

2010-11-06T05:13:00.004-04:00

tear the bloodfruit open.
eat the seeds. one by one,
like prayer beads.
spread the juice over your lips
with your finger
in bed. listen
to the coyotes calling.
close your eyes. fall asleep
to your lover's smile
burned into your mind
like after staring at the sun
you see it everywhere,
can't see anything else
for awhile.
i think i didn't make it

i think i died
when my mother was sick
and these past few months
have been my heaven
or bardo
before my next life

and somewhere everyone's crying,
but they shouldn't be.

detail a day #9

2010-11-06T03:52:00.002-04:00

if i could paint what i saw. myself
sitting on the toilet bare breasts sunburned
goosebumps nipples hard cool
air coming in the open window. half asleep. my hair
is a tangled mess of roots and dead leaves
down my back. sunstone pendant. staring
over my shoulder at the tigerseye striped spider
watching me on the wall. if i could paint
what the spider saw.

to become the beautiful parts

2010-11-05T05:19:00.007-04:00

I used to know
what you smelled like.
Took you in, once or twice.
Now only in the nonsense
of dreams do you make
my body remember
a foolish age, a struggle, the crisis
of this disappearance
is only in our heads. The butterflies
just know where to go
and they are always
going.

Detail a Day #8

2010-11-05T01:32:00.002-04:00

The online assholes fucked up my order
and sent my Helmut Lang Denim
to my old Pittsburgh address.
Fuck.
I want my god damn BLUE JEANS!!
That are a cool purple.

Want. Want.

NEED.

what it is

2010-11-02T02:48:00.005-04:00

Unfortunately, dear, men will always divide women into Madonnas and Whores, and you, Terrifying Angel, painbird, exquisite beauty- you will always be the Whore, will always be the one they fuck, those succubi (yes, men can suck) just to take from you the courage and ego-boost they need to go after the Madonnas who don't fuck or flesh out and so, they are forever so tantalizing and elusive. Ghostly pale girls that the sun would joyously burn into ashes if they didn't have cauls of good clean girl clout covering their boring asses up with hallmark card, slowmotion movie scene cheesy hopes and dreams. Oh fuck it. You're an idiot.

R.I.P. Bobby Porter

2010-10-30T00:34:00.002-04:00

R.IP. Bobby Porter. You were the only performer magical and amazing enough to get my agoraphobic ass out of my apartment and to a show in the last few years. Thank you for that. Thank you for the goose-bump inducing, toe curling vocals and the backflips, the crazy faces and rolling eyes, the intense energy for every single show. The Short Dark Strangers were probably my favorite band in Pittsburgh and, now, one of our Great Ones is gone. Vietnam vet, shaman of rock-n-roll, punk rock forever- you will be missed.

random page from old journal read in front of my altar tonight praying for wisdom

2010-10-25T04:31:00.006-04:00

August 2004-

Damn, sometimes it happens so quickly! Total misunderstanding and you have no chance to explain and there you remain, mistaken. It feels a little like having the wind knocked out of you.

He handed me a bouquet of flowers he had collected in his backyard. When I grabbed them, a bunch of tiny ants crawled out and onto my hand. I shrieked, a little. He was embarrassed, I guess, that his gift was full of ants, as if it were spoiled, but I didn't see it this way. I wasn't disappointed- I was delighted. Before I had a chance to explain it, he said, snidely, "Sorry there are ANTS in FLOWERS, who would have thought there would be ANTS in FLOWERS," and walked away, thinking I was some high maintenance girl afraid of ants, unaware of flowers. It was just too late. Neither of us had paid the bill and the tao had been shut off between us. He walked into his kitchen, letting the front door slam. I didn't have the heart or energy to go after him to say

No, no, you don't understand- you didn't see. In our sad maelstrom, dust-storm of judgement, you didn't see what I was seeing, remembering. There was a green apple tree on my father's land, beyond the sunflowers where the rows of corn were waist high on him, but over my head and it's where one day I had to pee and I squatted in the dirt and lifted my little dress. That's when my father taught me how the boys had to pee in Vietnam, quietly, like a cat, he said, like a cat- before they walked away, they had to cover it up with dirt so no one could follow their tracks. "Like this?" I asked, looking up at him, as I pushed fresh, damp earth over the wet spot I had left. "That's right, just like that." He answered, handing me an ear of early corn to eat. "Like a cat, quietly, slowly, and cover it up so no one can follow your tracks."

And that day my father picked an apple for me from the tree with a smirk on his face. I knew the smirk, the ornery trickster smirk, and I knew something was coming, but I didn't care- I wanted to play with him, even if the joke was on me. I bit into the apple and felt the juice and pulp of sweet fruit and I felt something else, something alive and swarming, all over my teeth and tongue and out onto my cheek. Ants. What felt like thousands of them, running all over my face and I started screaming and my father howled in laughter as I threw the apple down and slapped at my face and tongue, ready to cry, but I wanted to be tough for him.

He laughed hard, that laugh I loved so much- that sick, cynical yet paternal laugh, that Taurus laugh that loved to play tricks and knew to teach his children strength, to be unafraid, and taught them that the hard way, the best way.

"Piss ants!" He said, laughing and picking me up, "them are just piss, ants, Doe, they aint gonna hertcha. They're good for ya! Extra protein!" He carried me into the house, laughing the whole time and I had a smile on my face I was trying to hide because my pouting was getting me my daddy's attention and I didn't want to ever be let down out of those arms. He knew I was trying not to laugh. He carried me into the house and helped me wash my mouth out and told my mom I ate an apple full of piss ants. I finally laughed and my dad laughed harder and said, "Show me your teeth." He was smiling and I was frozen in the delight of his touch and attention, my little face stiff as he put his rough, warm hand under my chin and slowly and gently removed a dead one from between my front teeth.

I still laugh when I remember that. When I saw the ants in the flowers I was taken back immediately to that memory and that was the shriek, it was the preface to the great story I had to tell him. But he didn't understand, he had acted too quickly, not like a cat at all, and then walked away thinking I was afraid of nature. A boy raised completely on inner city concrete thought I was afraid of nature. He never knew me.

But with D it's so different. We laugh so much, all the time. It's something so beautiful and it amazes me every time- beginnings. How gentle and considerate and open people are in the beginning, when they are just getting to know each other. No one is yet taken for granted so everyone slows down, careful not to be cruel because of a real desire to see and know the person more and more. That rare twilight state before suspicions and insecurities creep in and learn to stay, learn our names.

I wish we could stay here.

"Dirty Girl Zine" - Call for Submissions

2010-10-23T21:53:00.003-04:00

Upon receiving the devastating news that $pread Magazine will soon be closing their doors, two precious voices in the Sex-Worker world have spun (in six inch heels, no less) into action and have taken it upon themselves to begin a new publication where the voices of sex-workers will be heard telling their own stories. Sex-workers, writers, and activists Tara (of Ecowhore and Hobo Stripper fame) and Sequoia Redd are teaming up (and what a team!) to help keep the voices of sex workers alive in print, which, for many of us working in such a highly stigmatized and taboo profession, is nothing less than a lifeline, literally. Their forthcoming zine, "Dirty Girl," is open for submissions. You can find more information on their blogs, including the difficult and careful nature of their struggle to choose a title that at once remains true to their (and ours) essential need to examine/deconstruct/reclaim/liberate/critique the commonly heard phrase, "Dirty Girl,"- one that many of us have had to contend with our entire lives, while also keeping the project open to sex-workers of all genders and bodies while creating a space where intersection and difference is respected and explored. Please support them in this amazing project!!

Look Before You Laugh

2010-10-23T16:43:00.001-04:00

Rape Culture USA: How race, class, misogyny and homophobia intersected in the Kelly and Antoine Dodson story

linklove

2010-10-16T20:59:00.000-04:00

Can I Call You Whore? By Grace Undressed

Detail a Day #7

2010-10-12T05:34:00.003-04:00

Naked under my chrysalis
of a damp grey and berry
zarape blanket, barefoot,
I cut through the mist
smoothly like a snake parting water.

There are no miracles
as I step out of the circle
of nightdark red
amaranth and sunflowers
lowering their heads
in humble kowtow concession
of the question of the path
lit only by the light of the North Star
sweating through the thick fog
above the dying fire
on the edge of a place

called, "A Bowl Which Holds The Moon,"
mountains all around. Anise crushed underfoot,
her poetry and song risen,
that unmistakable scent, a lifetime of it,
it plays with my hair. My eyes
narrow to try and find
an easy way

into the orange groves
with leaves as wet
and air as heavy
as jungle, I can't see a thing. I squat to piss,
then kneel to hear-

there are no miracles, it's just an easy way
to change instantly, enduringly

to leave your lover waiting
while you are gone in the groves,
naked in utter midnight and haze,
listening to the coyotes call and cry,
and laugh and howl
from all sides of the valley-

it's not crazy
to feel it in the same place
you feel sex and love,
for it to hurt, a little,
to hear several, separate packs
all through the mountains and so close,
at the river bottom, calling primal battle cries
that you understand, that you know

are what they are here for, that there are no questions.

It's not crazy that you want it-
to be everything of that sound.
To think some time long ago,
you could have had that, somehow,
just closed your eyes and eased in to this
rising sensation of losing consciousness,
falling into the shift
like smoke curling around itself
above the smoldering coals,
swallowing its own tail
again and again, you are new,
they are near, you may be
crying, but you are never
going to be a coyote.

Detail a Day #5

2010-10-08T00:31:00.000-04:00

I have met a praying mantis
in pain, tangled in a spider web so thick
it looked like fur, as if
the wolves I dreamt the night before
were really there, pawing my windows like friends
longing for me
to come out of this human sleep
to play, to eat,
but seeing me inside,
my nakedness wrapped in sheets,
they believed the Spider had got me
and left (DON'T LEAVE!)

and left something of themselves stuck to the broken wood
of the panes. So real, so thick, so sad- she looked
at me, Praying
Mantis, and I looked deep into the spiders
eyes, two black kaaba stones, reflecting the half moon
behind me, and Spider was waiting,
wanting, and Mantis was Praying.

And I can't tell you

what decision I made.

Your Mysterious Eyes Will Not Help You

2010-10-07T06:37:00.002-04:00

Detail a Day #4

2010-10-07T01:08:00.004-04:00

A child at the table waits
for me to place the dishes in front of her parents
then she holds up a small stone with the word,

FEARLESS

stained in black against the grey.

"Were you THIS on your first day of work?" She asks me.

Sometimes a poem

2010-10-06T19:55:00.001-04:00

just takes my breath. Enjoy.

Detail a Day #3

2010-10-06T00:28:00.004-04:00

Of course PJ Harvey would start singing now.

Our deep kiss closes like a corner cafe.

The melancholy waitress

wipes the tabletops of your teeth

off with her tongue and pulls the curtains of her lips down

upon a moment we will never live again

and when

you pull out, I see

a foggy, damp garden-

a false colored daguerreotype

of flowers with full lips and open mouths,

forever thirsty, fooled again

and again,

calling out

for the snake that gave their pretty girl an apple

and between the reeds, early morning,

snuck away.

Detail a Day #2

2010-10-05T04:45:00.001-04:00

I'm only happy when I'm creating

or fucking.

Is something wrong?

Detail a Day

2010-10-04T09:59:00.004-04:00

Inspired by Renee Alberts' Detail a Day entries, I'm going to take up this prompt and start my own. It at once inspires me to start paying more attention, write more, and remember, so much can be seen and said in the smallest details, the most elusive moments.

A couple sits in lawn chairs on the pull off,

wine and reverent silence-

their dusk ritual of watching

the sun set behind the Topa Topa

transverse range

as we stand and dance to no music

on the big bolder holding the plaque that describes the peak-

elevation: twenty nine years of twin-sisterhood above seal level.

Holy Mother, Any Mother

2010-09-30T05:35:00.002-04:00

for Berna.

Acrylic and Collage on Canvas. Cellphone photo, sorry. Thinking about mothers, especially those who lose their children.

2010-09-30T03:21:00.002-04:00

puppies kittens love pinwheels rainbows kids lollipops musicals happy endings rolling credits..

I don't need condolences, or e-mails asking me if I am ok, or e-mails with strange presumptuous comments about how sad I am and how that's ok, kind of cool, or so sad, it will get better.

I write. I am an artist. I work with artifice and amalgam and outright lies. Lots of truth, too. I am a writer. You wouldn't walk up to Goya and say sorry, dude, I'm sorry your dad chewed off your head, so don't say you're sorry to me. I am creating this and actually, although life is pretty intense for me, it's quite beautiful and I am extraordinarily pleased with it. So, there you go.

Love and Light- Davka DeerGirl, a girl who doesn't exist.

widow's walk

2010-09-29T21:48:00.000-04:00

I really let you in.

Damn

you broken, cracked vessel
who cannot be anything but
a broken, cracked vessel

and I can't be anything but

the water that also needs

"a place to crash"
in natural plunge,

gravitational pull,
panic picking my home

in the round, planet shaped absence

of the inside of your gourd
and once at peace, full globe again,
I start slipping
out slowly in so slightly
quivering trickles. Together

we made a thing
to tell time by,

to write koans by
to be clean in,

to not breathe in
unless we really believed

we were made of

flood without a fight

finding a river to return to.

When my legs opened,

you said you saw an amber light
coming from a window of rattling panes
on an old, shaking house by the sea
so long ago. Inside of me
was a picture of us, sepia, smileless,
with six children encircled

in an aura around our shoulders

and chubby on our knees.

There was a room
with dinner ready and still warm,

an earth outside still healthy, the oceans still clean-
but the fireplace was all ash and cold,
and blackbirds

were eating the bread
on the red, red table.

How did they get in, you ask? You're mad.
You need to know. They were me.

All along, my love, I'm sorry,
it was me going around ruining your story,
removing the portraits hung with hooks
along the hallway

of my dark uterus.

It was me-

telling the babies to die and the wind to scream

that haunted house into pieces.

It was me-

leaving the windows open

so the rain washed away

the pages,

the poems,

the pomegranates will stay.

And you will say

I was heartless,

but you never walked up the stairs.

I was only

a vessel, a big open sign.

You got some primal urge to come home, to crawl inside?

So do I. So do I.

just to say

2010-09-27T19:26:00.011-04:00

September 2nd, 2010

Over three months since I began this Ojai adventure in healing and escape. I feel good. I am sitting at the airport listening to the hum of mumbled conversations, register tape rolling, carry-on wheels turning, feet shuffling and running, and a man snoring softly. My cleavage is quite pronounced in this new sun dress and my cat vertebra necklace with the copper sparrow pendant is nestled between my tits and I like this. It's where the strangers' eyes are going anyway- and, when they get there, when they touch without asking (who can blame them,) they are greeted by a menacing piece of death that confounds them. They look disturbed and ask, "What is that thing?! Is that a skull? It looks like a face!"

I say no, it isn't, and smile and take off my shoes to walk through the metal detectors. Then, I am randomly selected to stand inside a strange, big brother machine that does something, not sure what, maybe takes an xray of my body? Now how's that for touching without asking! Those guys were just looking at my cleavage, but these ones are seeing my spine, my pelvic bones. I guess it's what I did to the cat. Showing off her spine everywhere I go. But the intentions are so different, the reasons redeem me.

I wait for clearance and am still smiling, thinking about all the people who see a face in the sacrum around my neck- how interesting it is that we see faces in spines and ourselves in each other, and, yet, we still scan each other's bodies for drugs and weapons.

Why, at airports, do I feel so acutely strange and enjoy it? Why do I feel so different from everybody else? Maybe because in this sea of khaki pants and suit shirts, these busy bodies who know the game and play it, I am the only one writing madly in a sketchbook, I am the only one wearing bones on my neck.

I close my eyes and think of my lover. I was visiting him back home, back in the past. My body is yearning for the Ocean backyard of my new life, but in my sleep deprivation sitting there, waiting for the flight to board, I keep drifting off to half dreams of his green eyes and his skin, skin that I could smell from a crowd of faceless thousands, or miles or lifetimes away, and recognize it instantly and instantly feel so safe, aroused, home. At Ari's funeral, I watched him from across the open hole in the earth and realized I could lose him. Everyone was standing around having the same realizations about someone else they loved in the crowd.

How should I love you? Who am I to sit next to you in your mom's sunny living room on the couch playing guitar in a towel while you scrape your bags into a spoon and shoot the syringe into your delicate, beautiful forearm? And I am so used to it all, it appears to me as innocent as insulin. Your cousin texts me and says that we are all enabling you, that she is considering cutting all ties. I think of Courtney love after Kurt died saying tearfully, out of her mind, "that tough love shit doesn't fucking work," and asked why didn't they just let him have his medicine, that "drug" that made his stomach feel better, made him feel good?

I don't know the answers. I don't believe in the rhetoric of twelve steps and I'm so tired of that perspective monopolizing the dialogue about addiction. There must be a middle way. No one talks about the war on drugs and how it is responsible for so much pain, for the inflated prices and people's need to go into the streets to acquire it, the studies on how easily we could reduce tolerance levels so that more and more wouldn't be needed, how legalizing drugs would create a world of practical healthcare and economic solutions, how we can go nowhere in this direction because of our dark ages perspective about drugs, pleasure, and the still commonly held notion that suffering is righteous, wanted, good. I've lost friends to the never ending War on Terror. I've lost friends to the war on drugs.

His cousin says to get a clue. Removing yourself from their lives is self preservation. Maybe she is right. Maybe I am setting myself up for the biggest blow of my life and am going to be the Eternal Lady of Weeping, like Mrs. Barnes, my middle school Spanish teacher, rendered ridiculous and beyond happiness by her fiance's suicide the day before their wedding. She always had lipstick on her teeth and face and painted her nails during class instead of teaching. When our friend Adam shot himself and introduced death of friends into our lives in such a real way we all still remember exactly what we were wearing and doing when we heard the news. Mrs. Barnes said we still had to take our final exam and I said we would not, we were shocked and scared and no, it isn't true that the best approach after tragedy is to just keep things moving as usual. All the students followed my suit and left the classroom, refusing to pretend everything was just as it always was because it wasn't. I was the last one out of the classroom and Mrs. Barnes grabbed my hand with her long nails and fat little hand covered in gold. She had tears in her eyes. It was the first time I had ever seen her get out of her chair. She said she had "experience" with this and I knew what she was referring to, everyone knew. She told me the details and said she understood how hurt we all were, but life had to go on. I was so shocked by the sudden, awkward intimacy, too young and stupid to understand compassion- to see a face in a spine, to see myself in her, so uncomfortable with this teacher in a moo-moo and wig that we had always made fun of suddenly becoming so human. I pulled away and mumbled something about the test and walked away from her. I still feel like shit about it.

But now, Senora Barnes, I understand. My heart aches for anyone who loses their love. Ari died because of his grief. Ari's new girlfriend is losing her mind with hers. And as I watch my lover sleep, I imagine it happening to me and my stomach flips and tears sting. I will not lose him. This will not be the great crisis of my life's narrative. Or I will live with him whatever life he has left and be so proud that we were able to love despite the shit we struggled with.

For three days I visited and we were thoroughly absorbed in each other's smells, skin, tears, hopes, fears, humiliations, orgasms, innocence and, well, experience. We laid together in the bedroom finally watching, "The Deer Hunter,"- one of my greatest fears in life, this film about three best friends from a few miles away from my hometown who go to Vietnam together. My father had told my mother once that this film was the most accurate portrayal of the emotional toll the war took on him and his friends and he would never watch it again. Movies about Vietnam destroy me, traumatize me and trigger me and leave me crying all night about a boy called Goat who got snatched up out of the beginning of his young life in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania and thrown into the jungles of Vietnam to witness things too terrible to ever re-tell. I cry about that boy in his pre-war photographs, hunting and drinking with his friends, dreaming of his future. I cry for that boy coming home all shattered only to be spit on at the airport by some privileged hippies and to return to a home where manhood meant not talking about your pain, not crying or calling for help. I cry for that boy becoming a man with severe PTSD and four children, overworked and overwhelmed, and violent. I cry for those four children who are still recovering or not recovering at all from the abuse they endured.

The main character looks and acts so much like my dad. The landscape is so familiar, except for the woods, the most important part, because the director had the hunting scenes filmed in Washington state as if the world, at least we, wouldn't notice the stark differences between Pacific Northwest mountains and our beloved Alleghenies and Appalachia.

My lover's warm, soft hand with long, beautiful fingers gently slides over my eyes when he knows there is a scene I cannot handle. I feel so childlike and safe when he does this, when I am next to him. After the movie, I am a wreck. I cry and cry and look at him as if he is gone and I had wished for one more day with him and this day is it and you should try this because the love that arises, the beauty you see will level you, will tear away all things that don't matter and you will see. I tell him we have to be strong, no matter what we've been through, we have to always ask for more bullets because I know that's what my father would do and I will do it for now on, always. He laughs, sees I'm serious, maybe a little crazy, and so he holds me and tells me it's ok, shh, it's ok and I eventually fall asleep.

On the way home, in the plane, with a whole seat to myself, I stretch out and think of him, my lover, of home, of my father. Of a line I once wrote about my lover's restless leg syndrome:

My father's Vietnam in your restless sleep.

Because doesn't my lover look so much like my father in the old photographs- tall, lanky and lean, with a handsome smile and crazy eyes. Doesn't my lover look so much like my father when I was a girl watching him build a fire or dig deep into the earth or into an animal's neck to provide us with dinner? Isn't the sadness in my lover's eyes and life the same I always saw in my father when I was so, so small and wanted to save him from all of it?

Back home (home? Ojai. Is this now home?) I lay in my bedroom drawing in ink and spit a picture I found in a 1985 National Geographic- a strong boned Mayan woman sitting in a dark room watching over the dead body of her recently murdered husband, the King. He wears snakes around his neck and is laying on a bed of flowers and other offerings and she is stirring the pot of some libation she will pour over his firm, smooth chest, grey with death, the location of her pleasure, her security, her center, her home. I keep erasing her face, trying again, smearing it with my thumb, trying again... because I just cannot capture the look of acceptance and pain and strength and never to be comforted sadness on her face. I keep trying.

Outside my window the possums and raccoons climb down the fallen tree to the garbage bins on their nightly rounds. The weather is turning, but the crickets are still chirring. I hear a coyote crying closely by. Goosebumps. I love this night music. The coyote cries disappear. I am happy- I saw my first one up close today in the mountains.

What does it matter? I don't know, it was beautiful? It was mine. Mine and the earth's at once and I was theirs. It was something I experienced, had. It was a stitch it time.

Abdomen

2010-09-18T01:45:00.011-04:00

link

"What he did to my kid is wrong," the victim's mother said. "Every day he gets to talk to his mother – every day! And my kid ain't never going to talk to me!"

My friend's little sister died two days ago. She was shot in the "abdomen" by her boyfriend.

Abdomen. Boyfriend.

I never met her personally, but am connected to her through a web of relationships and family ties and history. She's a friend's little sister, another friend's niece, my own niece's boyfriend's sister, a girl whose cousins and family I grew up with. I have slept over as a young girl at slumber parties in the place where she died. I have fought her cousins to blood and spit, to later laugh about it, to say, damn, weren't we wild when we were young- so glad we made it, but, oh, how the rules of the game have changed, it's crazier now, more deadly.

I've seen her pretty smile on facebook and said to my friends, aww, she is so pretty, all grown.

Now gone.

Tiffany. Seventeen. Abdomen. Tiffany. Seventeen. Abdomen.

Words whirling in my head. I light another candle in a ceramic holder I am beginning to call the Dead One because it has been used three times in the last few months to grieve, to believe I can still talk to them.

Crying before work where I wait on very rich people- a table full of New Agers in all white, crystals in their alkaline water, smiles on their sheltered faces, demanding to know when their food will be ready and I want to hold them by their chins until my nails dig into skin and say, "You will fucking wait for this food and you will be happy to wait and you will be thankful to eat because some can do neither. Some will never do either of those things again and you don't deserve the air that escaped her. Who the hell do you think you are?" But I don't, of course, because it's crazy, because it's not their fault, they didn't kill her. It is not their fault they live in a world of ocean breezes and choices, while she lived in welfare offices, tiny project units and bloody playgrounds. It is not their fault. They don't know how lucky they are just as I don't know how lucky I am. I want someone to blame. Or maybe I just want to grab the camera from their hands and say, listen, there was this girl named Tiffany. Take her name and tell your children. Tell somebody to help. Your abstract art and movies don't matter unless they are fighting for a better world. Tell them there is so much more than this bubble of happiness and something is very, very wrong. She was on my mind all night.

Her sister must be out of her mind with grief. She keeps updating her facebook status, "The God I Serve Makes No Mistakes." And everyone agrees, "Trust in our Savior to pull you through." "Let God Be Your Rock." I said myself, "God is with you, holding your hand. I pray for you and your family- may you find the peace the surpasses all understanding."

Don't you see words make no sense. When people splinter, shatter. (Tiffany. Abdomen. Seventeen. GED. 'I will always remember baby girl, that beautiful mouth, so outspoken. God Has Called One Back To Him, May You Rest In Your Throne In His Kingdom, My Beautiful Cousin,' ) It just doesn't matter what you say, say something and speak the family's language and mean it and pray.

I was trying to explain to some lucky as fuck friend (lucky as fuck- like me) that ok, no, money cannot buy you happiness, but money can buy you choices. How for so many there are no choices- or the heaviness of poverty and pain and trauma is so thick, so crushing, you cannot see the choices you may have. How an extreme lack of choices or an extreme onslaught of trauma leads people to split into a million pieces. Shattered. I can't explain things in a logic that fits for the logical who don't know with their hearts or think with their souls, so I speak in pictures. Shattered. A broken plate. A young girl's abdomen, so taut and small, so sweet, a pierced belly button, a rose tattoo with her dead cousin's initials in cursive, her small hands. A bullet traveled so far and fast through the skin and muscle and made its way out the back of her. It happened while I was on my floor, three thousand miles and ten years away from that place, posing naked in a new skirt for cell phone photos to send to my boyfriend. I covered my belly in one, opened my legs in another, played with the smokey purple smooth and sheer fabric and loved the end of day sunlight coming in, the way my skin feels in that glow, the way life is mine at that hour. My body alive and young and sexy and still becoming. I remember being a girl. Taking similar pictures or lifting my shirt for a lover for the first time or sitting with myself in the bathtub, too old for the mermaid fantasies I used to disappear into under the water, instead dreaming of skin and kisses and my body, becoming inside of it- loving and hating it, but always, from some third eye outside observation, seeing it as so sweet and vulnerable and innocent. Being a girl. If I needed a picture word to localize the site of that bittersweet struggle for you or a him or a newspaper or an anyone, I would say belly, I would say abdomen.

Abdomen. Seventeen. Girl.

Shot by her boyfriend. Carried, half conscious, to a neighbors' home. Opening her eyes in the hospital, "My back is killing me. Tell my dad I love him." Oh, how much can people take. Her father had a heart attack upon hearing the news. Her father, who I know had nothing so that she could have something. A father who was known not to eat so his baby girl could. A family that just lost another child less than a year ago. People. Good people. So, so poor. Like so many of us, or the us I used to be apart of- stuck. In cycles of spinning endlessly through a lack of choices and presence of violence and pain as dense as dark matter- and just as invisible, because no one sees the true stories and when you walk out of a lifetime there to a young adulthood somewhere else, how the fuck do you explain the shatter, the lack, the shit people are living with, daily? How that forever weighs on you and that burden is your history, your story and you're not giving it up.

Girl. Murdered. Abdomen.

This happens continually to the people I grew up with and love and call home. This new friend argued that splitting is a choice, as if some strength of will keeps some from splitting and not, actually, that some people live comfortably and sheltered while others are fucked over again and again. How can I give him this piece of me? How can anyone be understood out of context? How could I leave them all behind to dance around my safe, so far away living room naked in a new skirt, staring at my belly in a mirror, so happy to be alive, to be doing something new and non-violent. Who the hell am I to be alive?

That's what the dreams were saying. That's why I woke up so, so sad. I want to heal home. I want to make some kind of difference. I want magical powers, Christ powers to just lay my hands to heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the hungry. Not anywhere else but there. I want to be there. But I've been running since I turned eighteen.

She will never turn eighteen.

But I did and I made it out and I have been too lucky. I did and I sometimes feel so strange because home is something of a warzone and I just can't tell people about it anymore. It's too precious to risk the misunderstanding.

I call a long time friend and we talk for hours. She is so afraid for her own children. How will they grow up. Why can't she take them out of that place- just show them something different. She tells me she recently took the kids to Lake Erie.

"Girl, the people there, it's just so different. Kids driving the boats, laying in the sun. Not a care in the world. You take somebody from here and put em in fronta that wheel, what they gon' say? What is this shit? I can't beat nobody's head in with this? What I need this for?"

This makes me laugh. We laugh a lot to break up the pain of the details the newspapers don't know. The stuff that shatters, the girl's last words, the real reasons, the accidents, the lives ruined. The long litany of tragedies that led to this one, that keep piling up on top of this family. The straw that breaks the back?

"My back is killing me. My back is killing my. My belly hurts."

Rest In Peace, Tiffany. Beautiful Mouth. I'm so, so sorry. I don't deserve the air that escaped you. I'm falling asleep, holding my stomach, breathing slowly.

We Made It!

2010-09-13T21:34:00.003-04:00

Rick Majors turned twenty four years old this week. Although I wasn't in Pittsburgh to celebrate with everyone, my heart is swelling with happiness and relief. We made it, my magic boy, and friendship is what brought everyone through. I love you so so much. You're a good thing on Earth.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150251955110403&ref=mf

link

2010-09-06T04:36:00.002-04:00

"I have been long fascinated by the idea of "art from scratch", or the harnessing of art materials from readily available, free sources. One of my biggest art fantasies involves being stranded in an island, empty handed, and being able to make art." - Alberto Almarza

Click here and be enchanted.

2010-08-13T22:00:00.001-04:00

Four months since. Time passes so quickly, it's bullshit. How many haircuts have you lived through, how many doses, how many worn out shoes, how many half-ass hellos? My love lived twenty two rotations around the sun.

His body was perfect.
He was a King of Mind Tricks Manipulator and the Wondrous Listener of Love.
He wasn't even mine, really. He was a brother and son.
A best friend and boyfriend.
He was mine. Mine. Mine.

Fuck Starbucks. Fuck it when the respiratory system and nervous system combine firing neurons that talk shit behind someone's back and say, "stop breathing," when someone's just trying to feel good

or die.

Fuck benzos and Bayer.
Fuck heroin and Bayer.
Fuck today the day minus four months when my (MINE) died and didn't get my text that said, "Are you awake?"

Are you awake? Are you a meteor shower? Are you underground? Is this what you wanted?

Ego Resurrection

2010-08-12T06:03:00.004-04:00

(mixed media: collage, paint, fabric on canvas)

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel.
This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is
making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the
mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when
you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with
concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a
life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine
stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and
you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure.
Such life saving power when you smile."

~ Henry Rollins

(Quote found on Ari's facebook from his girlfriend Maggie.)

My Friends, Mano Farm, and Food Justice

2010-08-04T22:16:00.005-04:00

This video says it all for you, but I would like to say I am personally so impressed by, proud of, and completely behind these three friends and their farm and this project. Food Justice!

(Film by Micah Van Hove)

Edith in Eden

2010-07-25T15:41:00.008-04:00

Sitting with Carmen at the coffee shop sharing visions. I'm visiting Pittsburgh for a couple of weeks and last night's speakeasy themed party and today's hungover, crusty mascara mid afternoon morning coffee buzz has me a little more than in love with the city I escaped. Pittsburgh, you are crows in the bell towers and three dirty, sacred rivers and tenements falling in like broken teeth and fluid new calligraphy of sharpie graffiti on the dumpsters and hydrants and a man with a terrible towel thrown over his shoulder with a little girl's face tattooed across his bareback as he argues in traffic. You are Carmen and Carmen is an injection of pure Lorca and Roses and Pureland and Blake straight to the heart. She says when she woke up in the Garden of Eden a month ago and the flowers were soft, fleshy mouths singing Edith Piaf and Imogen Heap and telling her secrets, she had a wonderful chance to work out her gender identity issues. You see, her mother left her when she was a baby and she never learned how to be a woman. Growing up so close to her dad and brother, she felt like she was supposed to be a man, but didn't want that, but didn't know any other way. Then those trees in Eden started dancing and the bees were whispering and, well, she can't really tell me what happened there, but she knows now she is a woman and, do I think all women go through this? She asks me this with such a scared face, she really needs to know it's normal to wake up with a full blown "hallucination" of a primal Garden where gorgeousness gives you a soul makeover and a magic name and so many ways to see yourself. I tell her she isn't crazy, that all women go through something, although their vision of it might be different, and, others do, but have no idea what happened, and others don't notice, and others dig down deep into the dirty dreamless realm of consumerism and shallowness from fear of magic and madness- so those women don't go through it at all, but were supposed to, so yes, Carmen, you went through something real that loops your thread into the long blanket of being here, your grass and leaves into the basket of time, your hair into the eternal braid of women everywhere, sorry your mama left you hanging, but damn what a lucky girl you are to have the Great Spirit snatch you up out of here and put you there to work it all out. Keep working it all out, girl, and don't let those doctors scare you with their big words and big pills and fancy refutations of your reality. As Lauryn Hill says, they are "PHD's in delusion. Masters of Mass Confusion." Don't let them or anyone call you names, sweet, small girl of enormous imagination so contagious, the visionless ones call you crazy and won't talk to you and talk shit behind your back. As Billy Corgan once said of Courtney Love's publicized disintegration, "she's on a soul journey to hell and back, while most motherfuckers won't even step out the door."

And when, every final day of my cycle, before my period starts, I am completely laid bare with feeling and the veil between me and the dreamtime is completely gone and I'm laying in front of my Ancestor altar crying and calling out to my grandmothers, hearing them talk back, seeing visions of family memories from centuries ago and gifts of Spirit from my long, long line of powerful women all the way back to the beginning- I am connecting to my heritage, my birthblood, their Eternity in me, my sacred responsibility and if people call me crazy for talking to the dead and believing that even stones have spirits- that's ok, because, like Derrick Jensen says, I have thousands and thousands of years of preIndustrial beliefs and people to back me up- so be it, Carmen. Be "crazy,"- what's the alternative? Be still and safe, little Carmen. Carmelita.

Victor interrupts us with his own "crazy," going on and on about Meher Baba, showing us all pictures of him and telling us how he left college in the sixties to go join his cult.

"Oh hun," he says, "Isn't he beautiful? He was God, hun. Do you believe that? Hun, do you believe he was God?"

I think. "Just him?" I ask.

"What do you mean, hun?" Victor asks, his hand suspended in front of his face. My question must have been quite something if it interrupted the trajectory of cigarette to lips for Victor N.

"I mean like did he say he was God and he only or did he say he was God and so was everybody else?"

"Oh, I don't know hun. What's the difference?"

Victor is quite perturbed by the question and sits there thinking. Carmen and I keep talking. Victor stands up like Eureka! and runs over to our table, "Hun! He said he was God and so was everybody and he was born to tell others! That's what he said, hun!"

"Oh, ok. I can get behind that." I tell him.

"So you believe in him then, hun?" He asks, so close his nose is almost touching mine, his eyes wide and childlike, wanting my validation so badly.

"Yes! I do!"

Victor walks off to tell everyone at the next table that I believe in Meher Baba. I tell Carmen I believe in her. She tells me she believes in me and we laugh and hug for a long time despite the stares and cars turning slowly down the one way alley with blind, hungry ghosts guys blowing smoke out the windows and saying sexually inappropriate things toward us and our embrace. Their weak-ass bullets just hit us without even a thud and fall to our feet and for all we know, they were just berries from the tree above our heads. We hug and we agree we need more of each other.

After parting, I walk home and my eyes are open. Clarity, goosebumps, and so much magic everywhere. Last night for the speakeasy party, I was hot as hell in my lace bodice and fingerwaves and sequins hairpiece. I brought a huge bouquet of peacock feathers to give away to all the pretty ladies. I had so many left, I started giving them away to anyone who wanted and to watch everyone dance and use them to sexually accentuate their movements or to touch another's body or face or sword fight in silliness, I felt so alive and present and I closed my eyes and danced in the stuffy hot basement til sweat was spilling down my neck and chest and bodies were packed in so tight, everyone was touching. Eventually, someone's little dog got ahold of one feather and ripped it to shreds and we all cheered and laughed,because, even that was beautiful.

On the walk home, I gave a few more away to strangers and oh how their eyes lit up. Maybe I could make a life of that, giving away feathers or garlands of flowers to strangers on the streets and saying You Are God, or, at least, You Are Beautiful- and it would be an act of resistance just as radical and subversive as organizing a blackblock or publishing a zine calling for destruction and smashing and other masculinist language I can't really connect with because the essence of my soul and being here is creative and loving and I am no less an anarchist or activist or artist because of it.

Turn a corner toward my street and I meet the pace of a stranger who is walking the same way. That awkward moment where we are both so aware of each other's presence, caught in the energy of each other's orbits and auras, walking so closely we could be friends, but we aren't talking. She pretends to need her phone from her purse, her animal kingdom way of submitting, allowing me to go ahead. I wish I would have said Hello or You Are Beautiful or something. I need to wake up and really be here.

On my street as familiar as a favorite song or taste of bread or friend's voice, I hear the symphony of cicadas madly whirling and vibrating through the trees. I stop and listen and realize that, since I arrived, I've been hearing it, but taking it for granted and, no, I don't think I heard it at all in Ojai. Do they live and sing in Ojai? The smartweed pink and trembling all along the sidewalk, is this in California? Did the kids there pick the long stalks of the ryegrass and twist a loop around the budding top and singsong, "mama had a baby and it's head popped off!" as they pulled the loop up quickly and surely so the bud popped and flew at someone's face? Did they do this?

Why do I ask? It just matters.

Yes, as a girl said last night outside on the porch, "This is an easy city to lose your heart in." I nodded. Yeah, it is.

I couldn't tell if she meant it in a good way or that it was painful. I'm not sure how my love feels right now, but I didn't fail to notice that last night Edith Piaf played on the record player at the party and today Carmen said she was singing in Eden.

Stars

2010-06-28T14:12:00.004-04:00

Sept. 11, 2007

Place called city. Bodies called artists.
Lipstick on boys. Girls in suit ties
tight rope walking the cusp
between child and grown,
the only thing we own
are the shirts on our backs
and those we borrow and swap
and share sweat like sacred
holy water, we pray
to take what me must
while leaving no one behind.

The Church of Each Other-
the sunlight shatteres
all over the dumpstered candlebra
on the windowsill.
Star's eating candy cigarettes
because there's no food in the house.
He says, can I borrow an egg,
and flicks his ashes into the frying pan.

We dance for his birthday
in a room lit red
with strange dangling orbs
of antique lanterns like planets,
casting body shadows in eclipse of this
hand sewn love
onto the velure
portrait of Jesus.

This is the body in temporary
motion of love and poverty, young
enough to not feel the weight.
Intimacy clarified in desperation.
Records spinning. Strangers kising-
see how they lived here-

the kids with no future,
embracing Now
without asking for Later
because what else could they do
but wear stenciled owls
and Blue Oyster Cult
upside down cross question marks
on torn t-shirts,
sleeping in rooms
too small to stand in.

Found erotica on the dirty tables.
A brass sacred heart from the pawn shop,
originally stolen from a grave.
Good Life and Happy Birthday, Morning Star.

No future, no stable planet,
all past and presence, no choice
but to be joyful.

the girl who slept for days died on a tuesday (old journals)

2010-06-21T01:40:00.008-04:00

July 15, 2009

I have a dream of a home by the ocean and a breeze that saves the sleeping girl, the girl who slept and slept for days with seashells hanging from a wind chime nailed to her ceiling in a city so far away from the sea. The girl who slept and slept and died on a Tuesday. Her boyfriend didn't make it for even one year. Pittsburgh, what are you slouching towards, born already, maybe dead, but you don't know it yet, with your electric lights on the water under the bridges burning synthetic sun for the sleep all day suicide thinkers, kid keepers of secrets building fires with their own bones and breaking dumpstered bread by the river, drinking themselves to death with syringes and rusty nails and condoms coming up on the shore. Finding love there, somewhere. Making art out of the crushed cats on the tracks, the fallen feathers of wings we can't see at night. What are we doing and why do we love you so stubbornly, ruthlessly? Why can't we leave or, at least, wake up?

The Dark Moon

2010-06-13T02:43:00.013-04:00

This is the urgency: Live!
and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind."
(Gwendolyn Brooks)

to do: learn to draw a sacred heart. learn to draw a blackbird in many colors. learn to love. learn to kill to live. learn to measure wingspans by parallax. learn to disappear
into the sky, caw caw , keep the wings.

Moon, the witch I worked with who says she isn't a witch, but a sorceress, because witches believe in the law of three and she doesn't, said that tonight is a dark moon and it's a great time for hexing, unhexing, dark magic, and sending out dreams ("if you can't get them to listen in waking life, fuck them in their dreams, that'll get their heads spinning!") So, in honor of tonight's Dark Moon, my magic is to admit, at my altar, in front of my Ancestors and Orishas, that I intend to harm none, that today I made a promise to not harm one and, as I take promises quite seriously, I might as well extend it to allwhere. Not because I believe in the law of three, but because I want to stop losing, start listening. Learn. Grow.

I gotta give it to Moon, she's going for that dark power and I agree and it comes so naturally to me. Always did. Fuck the law of three. It isn't always so simple. The dark is just as important and beautiful as the light. My dark times were deep wells of wisdom and strength that I found so much in, found so many people I will always love no matter how fucked up we were when we were dying of thirst at the sink or swimming hole, faces floating like deep-sea fish around down at the bottom of that place we shared so harshly, compassionately, desperately, in darkness, where we found out things, secrets.

My dark times were mine- sacred burial ground of bodies and childhood dreams and trauma and weeping trees where I walked through a fog in a translucent dress of pale blue stained red and I was a warrior there, one kingfisher flying with me or sitting on my shoulder always to remind me of the colorful day at the end of the darkness of the forest I was living in. As a warrior, I saved lives and took many scars and gathered much knowledge. The dark is just as beautiful as the light. But tonight, I'm swathed in white, offering the morning glories and pomegranate flowers I collected on my way to work to my Mothers in wooden bowls. Tonight, I want to imagine a beginning- the little blossom of the pomegranate flower that becomes, slowly, over a summer into the fall, a beautiful, bulb of blood fruit full of delicious seeds that shine like gemstones and taste like the tongue of your most memorable kiss, the tongue that tastes, something it cannot do while speaking. I want to see it happen, the fruit's life- from blossom to ripe to rotting right on my bedroom wall, as if projected from a screen, in time lapsed photography. I want the reel to keep rolling all night, over and over. I want to watch all the people I love bloom and go and bloom and go right there on the wall through the tears in my eyes so the images dance and swim and blur into one another and me and I will watch til I realize I will one day have to say goodbye to all of it. To everyone.

Because I don't want to keep losing and the fastest way to lose sight of the hawk that's landed in medicine and magic in your middle distance by chance one day on a long, desert path is to break that breathless wait and watch and listen to try to stand up and grab hold or take a picture or believe anything is for keeps. You don't teach birds to speak. You teach yourself to listen.

i'm cracking up, feeling pregnant as fuck, tits sore- crying, crying. a post on the roboto board said the agave plant at phipps is flowering, that she is over fifty years old and that agave plants only bloom once and then they die. this has me crying, crying. this world. perhaps it's the only proper response to this world where such beauty and horror always exists simultaneously. i am going to find a whipped horse, throw my arms around his neck, kiss him, and, collapse. i cannot stay here one more day with you.

some say our tears are food for the ancestors.

learn to draw a black bird. learn to draw a brain. learn to draw a human heart. learn to draw a ribcage. learn to draw a pussy. dream in color. dream in brothers quay.

Miraculous / Meaningless

2010-06-10T20:10:00.026-04:00

Sequoia, who is out hiking the Appalachian trail by herself (yeah, badass,) wrote today about her lack of epiphanies and how this in no way means she isn't having an incredible experience. I'm glad she said this, because, I am, too, having an incredible experience which is, interestingly and, actually, refreshingly, marked by a lack of epiphanies- by epiphanies I mean explosive moments of conscious and speakable realizations of truth- that's what I think of when I say epiphany and frankly, I have had enough of those in my life. I wanna chill.

When we drove back from Alaska two years ago, we stopped at a Grizzly Bear Sanctuary in Montana. We hadn't wildly encountered any Grizzlies (thank god, kind of) in Alaska despite being there for over four months, most of the time sleeping in remote and wild places and we didn't visit the Kodiak for any guided tours so, we decided to stop at the sanctuary. The signs were sensationalized and the driveway was something out of Jurassic Park with its foreboding huge scale electrical fences, but when we paid our fee, parked, and got out to actually see them, they were HUGE DEADLY BEASTS- sitting on their fat asses eating, shaking flies from their fur, staring at us as we stared at them. When they walked around they were slow and majestic, beautiful- but so chill. This has been a quality of wild "nature" I enjoy most. (I hate the word "nature" and the implication of exile, for us, and Otherness, for them- the more than human creatures we co-inhabit this world with- that this word says without saying) I love it, the meaningless (don't hear that incorrectly), chillness of it all. Whether it's watching turtles in the pond swim slowly with their little heads bobbing up and down above the water, deer in the deep woods behind my father's house chewing and listening, ravens at a rest-stop waiting for bread, or Grizzlies in a clearing in the deepest bush of Alaska (which I haven't seen in person, but I'm sure it's the same) laying around licking their claws after a meal. For the most part, nature chills. Nature sits around eating and sleeping. Nature does a lot of killing and running and other stuff Animal Planet loves to catch on tape and play over and over again in different twists of scary, horrible- like "NATURES MOST FEROCIOUS MOTHERS!" or "THE WORLDS MOST VENOMOUS SNAKES!" In this fetishization of wild spaces and creatures, they get your attention, reinforce your fear, which, in turn, gets more of your attention which ups their advertising revenue and sends you out shopping to compensate for your lack of aliveness(and I mean mine, too, because we all fucking have our fixes for our lack of sensuous experience, every single one of us. So, anarcho primitivist, stop frontin'- I know you have your laptop and your facebook self portraits and your blog, yeah, you do, you crave cultural validation and civilized communication as much as anybody,) and it's just bullshit. Nature chills and it has no deep meaning except inside of us where we decide or are conditioned to feel a certain way about it. Without a doubt, we need "it" (ugh, words) and with our lack of connection and presence we are in deep shit, but the small stuff is what gets me most. The green iridescent hummingbird that hovered in front of my face and touched my lips a few days ago out in the courtyard, a kiss that sent pleasure quakes all through me and through my entire life and goosebumps all over my skin and my Hindu neighbor watched and said, "Wow, you must be a divine being," to which I replied, "I'm trying."

Watching two spiders fight over space in the corner of my room last night while I was laying in bed, thoughtless. Squatting next to Maggie, the old dog who lives here, while eating an orange. And, with her, watching the leaves tremble, the crows caw and swoop down and around and above, the squirrels playing in the tree and making a laughter like chirping sound I have never heard squirrels sing before. I sat there with Maggie for a long time and really just felt good, chillin. Felt like Maggie was telling me, chill. Be still and know that...

I don't know what to tell you. I have come to realizations, sure. I'm traveling. I'm far from home all by myself again for the first time in two years, something that was unthinkable during the worst times of severe Post Traumatic Stress I was living with after a lifetime of violence and a few years of rapid fire loss of friends and loved ones and the assault on my perception by horrifying, visceral images gory enough for a horror film. So just being here is a huge feat for me and I am happy with myself. I am having beautiful dreams again, albeit it's a trippy, feel it in your teeth and fingertips kind of pleasure rhythm that gets punctuated now and again by the kind of nightmares that stay with me all day, sure. But I like myself. I am liking my solitude and my time with flowers, animals, herbs, people, books- the spider who took over my Grandmother Shrine with a web as thick and wispy as shed fur, mullein leaf and fennel and raw carrots pulled up out of the dirt and eaten as is, Shellini my neighbor, Italian talk with her hands like my womenfolk do, yet prays Hindu songs over our bowls of Daal and brown rice before we eat, the lizards on the trail down at the river bottom, the Turkey vultures above the hills and farms, the Mountains, the pink horizon at dusk, Chekhov and Pinchon, my beautiful friends who call and webcam chat just so we can make funny faces at each other and laugh for an hour or two- all of it. So much of it. A little boy in the fountain in the park swimming, laughing, plugging up the hole on top til he made the whole thing his own huge squirt gun and, just by moving his cupped fists, he was able to spray his dad right in the eye and his dad laughed. The ocean- deeper than I can ever imagine, but, yeah- nothing really deep or amazing to tell you.

Except that you have to breathe and let life surprise you. Meditate. It's a must. Get outside, every chance you get- a woman who wrote a memoir about being a pioneer in Alaska said when her sister, who was with her when they were young there, got old and developed Alzheimer's, people talked to her but she never made sense- unless she was remembering Alaska and, then, everything was crystal clear. You will remember your sensuous experiences the most. Your real friends are precious beyond measure. There's nothing wrong with needing people. It's ok to be in mourning in all sorts of ways, to cry in public, to feel like shit, to have bad days, even when surrounded by beauty. It's ok to spend your whole afternoon sitting with a blinding, old dog watching birds and not accomplishing or writing a thing, it's still a day well spent. Not all spiders that look like Black Widows are Black Widows and killing what we fear should not always be our first response. Killing is ok sometimes. When things get rough? Your heart gets broken or a boy doesn't understand you and maybe, never will? Meh, brush it off as easily and effortlessly as a fly off your shoulder. Water down a lotus leaf. Om. Be still and know that...

God says Chill.

Yeah, lots of realizations. Epiphanies? No.

But- butterflies in the Larkspur, spiders on the Shrine, and rattle-snakes on the path, what more do you need?

the burning throat

2010-06-08T23:04:00.002-04:00

-2006 For Amanda

Shot after shot of shame,
of good sex and taboo breaking-

I drank all night from St Johns rain bucket
after buying a ‘Lives of the Saints’ book
from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart
and a black thong from the Dollar Store
to go with my guilty conscience.

She said, If I would have known then
what I know now

I would have worn a necklace of garlic
when I met you.

I couldn’t blame her,
my dear lover’s wife,
May God be with you

and Lucille Clifton
and Kali’s fury

and beautiful babies running from thunder
into your arms fresh from the shower,
the towel falling to your feet

as my sad eyes reflect
off the water droplets
that lick the length of you.
May you always keep your man.

May you sharpen your talons
and your fangs
against my rough stone edges,
my raw, wild beauty.

I drank from your blood
and went walking
through the dark tunnels
of your heart
where I heard his footsteps approaching
from every corner,
I saw his shadow on the wall
flickering
when the anger set your body on fire.
I was burned at the stake.

Extinct birds fly
back to life from those flames.

Whirlwind in the Tree of Chimes

2010-05-31T21:57:00.008-04:00

My life. My beautiful, astounding life. My life of many colors and continents and people and places. Jesus, I am dizzy. Had dreams of diving through a deep, murky swamp with Sandy to retrieve Ari's bones for his grieving mother. Woke up to a black widow in my bed. Outside in the sun, I talked for four hours straight with my new amazingly cool neighbors about many things: Amma, the hugging Guru, Appalachia, Conspiracies, Samoan rituals of apology, Horror Films, Energy, Death, the Sea. A green iridescent hummingbird hovered in front of my face and literally kissed my lips. I'm not kidding. Someone left a deer statuette on my doorstep, a mother nursing her fawn- identical to the one on my new journal. I talked to an old, old friend from home- a beautiful boy I crushed on hard my whole girlhood and made out with when I was thirteen in the rain behind a house party in the projects with Candy Rain and Freak Like Me thumping from the speakers in the basement way back when we were all crazy and young and poor, but didn't know it. I started crying to him about Ari and he responded in the most simple, straight up, real talk of the heart that is all feeling and connection wrapped in language as common and home as chicken soup, not profound, not surprising, but hearty and full of love. We talked about our friend Chris who got shot by some crazy white guy with a sawed off shotgun in the same projects years later probably in the same spot where we first learned each others' bodies. We remembered Chris's voice- so much talent, singing O Holy Night for the Christmas choir concert in high school and how he brought us all to goosebumps and tears when his voice tore the crescendo straight up out of the little auditorium like an Angel taking flight with all the wind of creation. How no one has forgotten that moment or that voice because it embodied us, it was us and our talents and our strong hearts singing despite everything we had seen and lived through. How we all counted on him to get out, to go on and do great things and remember us, represent us. How we all know he would have gone so far had he lived and how we all have to live with that. Especially, Krissy, who was the cop who got called to the scene. Who, last time I saw her, was drinking hard at her uncle's bar by the Lane Bane Bridge, unable to recover from seeing her friend from childhood dead, covered in a sheet. There are Buddhas in the backyard here. There is a lightness in my heart and, as always, and, this is ok, there is the heaviness of a life seeing good, beautiful, talented people destroyed by systematic cycles of poverty and crime. How sometimes my happiness here is interrupted by a feeling of survivor's guilt. How sometimes it's just good to be with people who live with the same weight on their backs because they don't look at you funny when you're tired and broken, quoting the bible, or saying a "straight up" or "no doubt."

And sometimes it's good to be three thousand miles away from it where nobody looks at you funny when you say words like "consciousness," and "energy," and "chakras." I talked with my new neighbours about the powers of costumes and masks in rituals and celebrations, how it brings out a different you. How all of these yous are you.

I was afraid to mention it, but I told them about Ari and they were so present and kind. She gave me avocados and tea. Food, another language of love. Everyone here wanting to help me heal, get healthy, so giving. Such a spectrum. People. Are. Good. Everywhere.

Before I hang up with G, I tell him congratulations on his baby girl. I said finally one girl has the heart of the man who broke so many of ours in middle school. He laughs and says, "You're crazy, girl. I miss ya'all, no question. Those were some of the best days of my life."

One day I will circle back to my hometown and my people there who live through so much shit and have so little, but always, without a doubt, even if we haven't talked in over ten years, will be there for me when I call them crying in the middle of the night and I will get those kind, country words of the soul that soothe so much. What a life. What have I done to deserve such a beautiful life?

the smell of here

2010-05-29T01:39:00.005-04:00

I came here to write, so write,
say something say anything

to me say you are sorry he died
say you, too, have hurt say you are dead already
say he is with sarah now say we are all walking corpses
say the ripe oranges were good I helped myself
to on Canada pronounced Cunyada Road
on my way to break in safety at Cristina's
pronounced Mother pronounced Cynical
pronounced hopelessly weird by the paid for happy
people in this town, but said by me
Cristina with the r rolled because she's old world
and you can cry in her arms and she says let it out,
just let it out and her eyes are lovely-
too dark for me to read the dilation,
where the pupil ends and the iris begins
where, in others, the pupil believes
in its own stupid independence
but the iris is where the color is muscle
and mother and moves according to light and the law
of what we can let in what we can take don't take
it personally don't take me out of context don't
tell anyone what I told you. Tell me
you are sorry, sorry, say something,
be trite, be common, be human, and if speechless,
say so.

Write. What I was writing for him when he died.
What I thought I could finish in time to save his life,
something powerful enough to make a young man
built of and born in an age of self destruction
want to live, forgive
himself for the smell of a girlfriend
rotting in bed,
but when saviours now die
for nothing, my Osiris saw the starbucks bathroom sign
and asked for the key
and locked himself in
and probably said sorry before asking for the key
because he walked around feeling like shit and sorry
for being anything
so now you should say you are sorry to me
for there is no way out
of the way I feel but the feelings of you
touching the feelings of me.

Fear. Love. Hurt. Scared.
These single celled organisms
are primary colors
and combined and mixed
they can make any unspeakable thing
into words that prove we are not alone-
not when we're born nor when we die
even behind locked doors
at Starbucks.

The smell of it here: new. The lavender
and honeysuckle. The smoke on his clothes
and breath. The someting we kept secret,
took literally to the grave. The way people keep asking me
why do my friends
keep dying? As if we deserve it, my battered and bruised
big hearted, my island of broken toys

in a world so troubling I will always love the troubled
the ones who see your silence for the bullshit it is
and die to make you cry or at least, uncomfortable,
die for no reason at all,
die because they hate themselves
die because they love life too much
to watch it go to shit,
down the tubes,
down the silence
there's a word falling, a name
now floating, belonging
to no one, like the smell
of here. What can you say?

Toro Nagashi For Ari

2010-05-18T18:43:00.010-04:00

Oh Nobly Born, beautiful Ari, may our love and light guide you gently to your next shore.

2010-05-18T01:47:00.007-04:00

Ari, you showed up at my house just out of rehab with nothing but a few quarters in your pockets and your walkman full of sad, sad Elliott Smith and your beautiful smile and stunning eyes and desperation and sarcasm and shaking hands. I was so happy to see you. Then N and C showed up and, they too, were so happy to see you again- despite all the shit over these past months and couple of years. We had a great month. You were happy.

Now, you're dead. Overdose. I can't even begin to process it yet write it out, but I will. I love you. Forever. The Rabbi said you wrestled the demon and lost and maybe it's true. But Sarah is there waiting for you and I will see you soon, my lover, my friend.

R.I.P Ari

In an hour

2010-05-08T20:45:00.006-04:00

I tell him every life is worth writing about. The man on my massage table who tells me his name is John. They are always Johns. Johns or Peters or Pauls, the most common, generic names they can think of on the spot, the names of apostles- and why not? Sex is holy, I assure him as he sits up and reaches for his neck and says maybe he should remove the gold cross on the silver chain. He's nervous. Is it appropriate to wear a cross for a sensual massage?

Of course it is, I say.
I'm Catholic, he tells me.
That's ok, I tell him, So am I...sort of.

My bedroom is full of icons of every religion. I've covered my altar with an indigo iridescent cloth emblazoned with silver embroidered stars, but my Black Madonna of Częstochowa is still staring down at him from above my dresser with her sad eyes that see right through a man to his sick yet eternally innocent soul, to his death and back, to whatever she didn't do to deserve him or happen to have him or have him happen to her, whatever it meant. She has him, her baby saviour in her arms swaddled in sacred red cloth and her dark skin is scarred across the cheek. In reality, the scars were an accident of fire in the painting's history, but the icona painters kept them and rendered them over and over again through time to tell us something of our suffering, to tell us, as the poet Renee Alberts once said, "We are more alike than not."

He looks up at her like he knows he knows her, but he's never seen her so dark. He doesn't ask me to explain her. I am glad because I couldn't. She means so many things to so many people, what could I say that wouldn't leave something so important out? To me and many others, she represents Erzulie Dantor, the warrior goddess of scarred skin and a missing, cut out tongue, the fierce protectoress of women and children in Haitian Voodoo. She cannot speak except for a desperate clicking sound but she stands forever with knife in hand and enormous love in her heart, ready for battle.

"Besides," I say jokingly as I remove his hands and lay them at his side, "it will protect you from the vampires."

He smiles as I lean down and bite his bare shoulder gently. This makes him laugh. This puts him at ease. There are so many layers to things. So many ways to see anything and our sins are sometimes our greatest joys and our scars are sometimes our welcome signs to others saying we too have suffered just as this illicit meeting of me and him in the soft candlelight of my bedroom says so many things, says we too have been lonely, we too have been skin hungry. Why not?

He tells me his name is John. John saw my journal on the shelf. He asks me if I am a writer. He's face down on the bed with his head in the rest and he's staring down at the mirror I'm standing over, straddling so he can see my naked body from above from below. He's paid a pretty penny for an hour of nude massage and the mirror is my clever way of making sure he can enjoy it while I massage his back. I look down into the mirror and he sees I'm looking and laughs.

"Nice view, huh?"

"Yes," I tell him, "I like looking too."

And I do. I love my body and I intend to enjoy it, every day for the rest of my days.

"What do you write about?" He asks.

Sigh, this question. Every writer gets this question and every writer feels uncomfortable when they hear it while at the same time feeling a little elated that someone actually cared enough to ask. But this question is only asked by people who don't write and they don't realize that it's a question that is impossible to answer without sounding trite, without reducing your life's greatest passion to a few generic, catch phrases. I tell him I write about my life. It's all I can think of to say. He asks me to tell him a story.

We had snuck into the cave behind the cemetery to fuck. The gates were closed because it was after sundown, but the moon was full and lighting our way as we fumbled up the hill and into the darkness where we kissed and he told me to turn around. I did as I was told and I liked it. I bent as far forward as I could in the cramped space and held myself steady against the damp, cold walls. It had been raining off and on all day and through a small crack in the ceiling, I could see the moon and the moon could see me as he lifted my skirt and pulled my thong aside. I spit into my hand and reached back to grab his dick. He used his knees to open my legs and he slowly pushed it in. Mmm, that moment. That initial moment. I live for the pleasure of that moment. While he's fucking me, he pulls my hair back and I'm suddenly face to face with a small, yellow spider on an intricate web deep in the walls. The web is wet and there are raindrops suspended on the lace. There are hundreds of tiny droplets and inside each one I can see us- dark, shadowy forms fucking. There are hundreds of us fucking. He's breathing into my neck and in that instant I think of Abram's "The Spell of the Sensuous," where he writes that all perception is intercourse. Just like a hand touches while it also feels itself being touched, we see while we are being seen and the human animal is not even complete not even really here until the circuitry of our senses connecting with something else, someone else and back again is complete. The yellow spider sits on her elaborate web still and silent. I see her and she sees me and I see us, hundreds of us, fucking and as soon we come, we hear people yelling from down below. We stand up in a hurry and I accidentally hit him in the head with my head as I fumble to fix my skirt. We look down and there are five or so teenagers laughing, looking up at us.

"Busted!" they yell and hoot and we look at each other and burst into laughter. Perfect.

I didn't get to finish the story. I only had an hour and I was already rubbing John's cock to climax before I even had a chance to tell him about our spider or that we stayed hidden in the cave until the boys left and, when we were done laughing, we stood in each other's arms, out of breath, watching our spider and our reflections in the moonlit raindrops all over her web. I didn't tell him that we named her Meridian.

As John was about to come, I said his name. John, John. He grabbed my wrist and said, "Eric, my name is Eric." He said it with a little shame, as if lying about his name in the first place was really bad. I laugh to reassure him. I laugh because it's sweet that he doesn't realize that everyone in this business has an alias, including me. I laugh because he gave me his real name. I guess I don't blame him. If a woman is calling out my name all breath and sweat and human connection, I'd want it to be my real one, too.

Eric, Eric, Eric.

After we are done and getting dressed, Eric thanks me for the story. He says one reason he loves coming to see me is because my life seems so interesting. He says it sadly, as if his life is not. He's an accountant, he says. He's middle aged and divorced and lonely. I said every life is interesting and if we look at it right, we can see ourselves in hundreds of different ways, different names, in every moment.

"Like Eternity in an hour?" he asks, quoting Blake. Yes, I say and smile and take the money from his hands. "Just like that."

"I write a little, too," he confesses, "Poetry mostly, but next time I come in I have a great story for you. When I was little my friends and I talked to Robert Reed on a Ouija board, you know, the dad from the Brady Bunch. Back then everybody said he was gay and that's all we could think to ask him!"

"Did he answer you?"

Eric walks out of the front door and zips up his coat.

"I'll tell you the answer to that next time."

John Eric leaves and I laugh again. I laugh because Eric is more than a John paying for touch. John was a little kid once playing with ghosts with his friends, something like the kids who caught my lover and me fucking in the cemetery. I laugh because I was wrong. What do you write about is a question. Nothing more or less. It's a question people ask when they are nervous and need to fill the silence with small talk, it doesn't mean they don't write.

I sit down and count my money.

More alike than not.

party canceled

2010-05-08T13:05:00.002-04:00

Long story- all my best friends had something else for the night. I will rescheduling the party for sometime next week, if I have it at all because I am so tired from working hard and just ready to leave.

Lucylle, The Sex Worker Rapper

2010-05-07T14:11:00.002-04:00

This girl's music is dope. Check her out and give her some sex worker support here!

Par-Tay

2010-05-02T21:49:00.004-04:00

Saturday!!!! The 8th!!!!!

Great Changes

2010-05-01T00:59:00.003-04:00

Great changes are occuring for me. I am leaving Pittsburgh in one week and moving to Southern California to heal. The last two to three years have been really difficult for me and finally, things are clearing up, I am finding my feet, and it's time to heal.

There are so many things I haven't told you about. My energy was very depleted and for a long time, I lost my why. Writing is my main priority for summer and I hope to somehow start writing out all the crazy, painful, amazing, intense, unbearable, beautiful, etc experiences I have lived through.

Two beautiful, dear friends became vicious enemies and although it was partially my fault, I am happy to say that their incessant attacks against me, their obsessive harrasing and stalking has now been brought to an end. Well, at least within me it has and I wish them nothing but the best and I hope they also begin to heal.

I love Pittsburgh, but I am not well enough to remain here. I hope to return someday and be the medicine, but for now I need sun, the ocean, good people, earth, and solitude. I need to write and be in a place where I can write without people (said stalkers) using what I write as fodder for their obsessive campaign against me. I want to write about sex work. I want to write about my survival. I couldn't write about these things here because they were using everything against me. The distance and detachment will allow me to do so.

Through all of the shit, the main lesson I learned is that nothing is more important than friendship and, by the Grace of the universe, I have been blessed with so many precious friendships that have literally kept me alive.

Just rambling, but I wanted to let you know I haven't disappeared.

In July, I will be back in Pittsburgh for my reading at the library.

I will make sure to post pictures of my great American roadtrip west.

Talk to you soon. ;)

Don't Leave Your Friends Behind #3- Edited by China Martens

2010-04-25T16:10:00.005-04:00

China Martens has been editing radical parenting zines for nearly twenty years and I am so honored to tell you that she, in collaboration with Vikki Law, has included my "Red Crayon" essay (originally published in HipMama Magazine) in her latest issue, which you can read here. If you appreciate what she is doing as mush as I do, throw them a couple bucks so she can continue to publish these amazing zines. Print it out and pass it on to any radical parents and/or allies you know.

Journal Cover Art

2010-04-21T22:00:00.007-04:00

As soon as you speak
I feel I have to wear a mask
of fragments from imaginary conversations.
As soon as you speak
people act as if you had the sound
of the rain outside
or New Orleans
or the history of man
or the condensed manuscript version
of the desperate
floating dress, her hair floating,
fluid enough to cross the ocean.

What a shipful that would have been!

Two lanterns full of erotic changes,
big eyes stuck at the moment
of the opposite.

We have a lot to learn from
a symphony of broken plates,
erotica made of papier-mache.

After the still birth
an old lady on the bus
made such a mischievous, childlike face,
it gave us June.
In Love, nobody wins.

Click on images to enlarge. Click on them again to enlarge again.

Difference 1.2

2010-04-19T20:29:00.002-04:00

I pulled a fancy mug out from his rich mother's cupboard.
It was white and had a gold New Agey goddess symbol on the side.
At first glance, I thought it was the Baby Phat Cat.

"The what?" He asked.
"The Baby Phat Cat!"
"What's that?"

He didn't know. He really didn't know.

"Same thing," I answered.

Dane Does it Again

2010-04-18T02:14:00.000-04:00

Oh hell yes. Read here.

text message miracles and mad bright once-isms who will remember who will keep the record?

2010-04-10T17:44:00.000-04:00

late night laughter and reassurance and wonder when i was wanting to die and you were alive on the other line, thank you, friendship, i will never squander you, the stuff love is made of.

[che] please relax i luv u call me if u need me i can stay on the couch anytime i fall right asleep u know yr great it would be good to see yr smiling face luv u

[john allen] Remember how much you are loved. Kind spirits protect you.
[john allen] Everything will work out.
[john allen] Rest your beautiful eyes.

[M.T.P.] It was desolate cold and rainy when I left. Downtrodden cowboy western music and a tumbleweed of my fliers went rollin' down thru doomfield...

[john allen] love you. be my friend until we die.
[me] of course, even after.

[me] is something wrong with me?
[john allen] You are amazing and divine in countless aspects.
[john allen] vinculum vinculorum amor est..

[che]that all women give the cold shoulder to their men if their men don't give it to them first i saw a picture of you with a splayed lamb tied to a crucifix in mexico

[M.T.P] you're so beautiful, baby. I loved being with you today.

[che] I have been pierced by forefield of color and pure beauty that is not of this world its startling in its clarity but undescribable in its possibility i luv u

[Ryan] eating whole foods salad bar on foodstamps, thinking of you.

Sitemeter: more ways

2010-03-28T16:22:00.001-04:00

people found my blog through google by searching for:

"i mermaid.a mermaid when i touch water.i mermaid blue or red tail.and when i am dry i human.and i tell only 4 people about being mermaid"

and

"girl walking home man fuck her from behind in a alley"

Snakes Eyes and Betrayal (On Becoming a Woman)

2010-03-26T04:27:00.005-04:00

Whitmansexual

2010-03-22T03:22:00.002-04:00

by Antler

Whitman was a mansexual,
a womansexual,
A grasssexual, a treesexual,
a skysexual, an earthsexual.
Whitman was an oceansexual, a mountainsexual,
a cloudsexual, a prariesexual,
A birdsongsexual, a lilacsmellsexual,
a gallopinghorsesexual.
Whitman was a darknesssexual, a sleepersexual,
a sunrisesexual, a MilkyWaysexual,
A gentlebreezesexual, an openroadsexual,
a wildernesssexual, a democracysexual,
A drumtapssexual, a crossingbrooklynferrysexual,
a sands-at-seventy-sexual.
Whitman was a farewell-my-fancy-sexual,
a luckier-than-was-thought-sexual,
A deathsexual, a corpsewatchsexual,
a compostsexual, a poets-to-come-sexual,
A miracle-sexual, an immortalitysexual,
a cosmos-sexual, a waiting-for-you-sexual.

Well Documented Life.

2010-03-21T02:31:00.006-04:00

1992: Self-portrait of me tied up inside of a tear, smiling. First words written in first journal, age ten:

"Never keep your thoughts hidden because you'll be like everyone else and that's the worst thing in the world."

And of course, a picture of my planet....? Just in case we destroy it and escape to outerspace. Someone has to remember.

sitemeter

2010-03-20T15:43:00.003-04:00

it's cool to see what search words brought people to my blog. today's top two:

big tits and deer horns

and

how to sea a soul.

Cheetah

2010-03-17T00:22:00.006-04:00

(2006)

I don't care
that your ex girl-friend is a Suicide Girl
with big tits
and perfect pale skin
and pretty lips
of blood-red
under black bobby bangs
like your every run-of-the-mill
Betty Page wannabe.

But not really. I'm jealous
as hell. I feel plain and pure
against her dark-virgin black lace bra
above that ass so fat and fine,
if she were mine
I'd be reeling.

It's ok that you said
you were young and crazy then
and I said maybe now
old and wise
and you said maybe.

She's got a cheetah tattooed shoulder
and her shadowed eyes
are surprising
in every spread eagle shot. Surely,
you miss her sometimes.

This is love. Cheetah hunting.
Selling furs and tusks to the untraveled,
buying glossy paper girls
for a bedside obsession. This is love-
the leprous new lover
reeking insecure, singing
gospel
against that devilish ghost of a girlfriend
you've got licking every pole
in your mind.

As I go down
I find myself sucking in her spirit
and blowing my body back in backwards,
believing suddenly
you can hold many memories equally
loved,
but you know no girl
wants equality.

It aint the bra-size or the boylist
that makes a girl good, right?
Just cause she's selling that shit
doesn't mean she has it, right?
Doesn't mean I need it, right?
Does this mean you believe me
when I say it doesn't bother me?
That bothers me.
I mean, I know I'm beautiful,
right?

Next to your sleeping serenity,
I'm up all night scratching my fur raw,
scratching my secret scabs to blood-red.
My eyes are open and alert-

This is love,
procuring night vision.

Roots

2010-03-15T05:01:00.007-04:00

"We, too, are going the reverse-flower way." - Yehuda Amichai

My roots are my family, my ancestors, their names walk in my head. My roots are memories of aunts and uncles and cousins and houses full of people and laughter, children and animals everywhere. My roots are people you might not acknowledge or see as beautiful. My roots are poor and proud. My roots are rough, hardy, hand sown, and deep. Roma gypsy great grandmother said she shapeshifted to save her life, read palms and tarot cards and cooked toe nails and mandrakes in kitchen spells for lovesick women, predicted my birth and still visits my dreams. My great-great-grandfather killed in a gunfight over a poker game in a saloon still standing on main street in the town where my father grew up and still lives. My roots are generations and generations in the dirt, coal mines, gardens and prisons. My roots are war and deep, profound love simply expressed in kindness and the preparing and sharing of food. My roots are violence. My roots are flowering in peace, in the idea of peace, a real desire for peace in my lifetime, a promise to myself to end all destructive cycles. My roots are sun-cracked skin, greenhouses and vegetables delivered on a mule on the dirt roads of the New World. My roots are Mediterranean and Grandma Diamond and ancient fables and buttermilk biscuits and pentecostal long skirts and singing by the river on Frogtown road, my roots are with her. My roots smell like wet-earth, cowshit, cooking sauce, deep-fried seances. My roots are my destiny. Because I needed to happen. The universe was created for me, Appalachian braid hanging down my back like a poached snake, my olive skin becomes thick hide and my hooves are on the ground, running, always running. My roots are deer hunting, squash, slaughtered chickens, Sicilian blackjack, babies on knees and strapped to our backs and hundreds of white cabbage butterflies flying at a fairy tale pace through the catnip. I stand in a yellow summer dress laughing as their wings brush the insides of my thighs.

My Life in Boxes

2010-03-14T01:12:00.002-05:00

I'm filling boxes with my past, trying to decide what has present-tense value. I have filled nearly five milk crates with scattered poems, unfinished essays and maniac drawings. What is the meaning of all of this? What happens to it when I die? When I move, I love to go through the apartment as if I am someone coming to clean everything up after the funeral. I like to look at it all through a stranger's eyes.

Thousands and thousands of pages. A shitty job. Mind full of obsession, mad love and art. I am Henry Darger reincarnate, aspiring toward something a little more Dostoyevskian.

The Entity We Must Honor

2010-03-12T00:44:00.005-05:00

Long claws in the chorus
keep our prey neck naked
and willing to be blood for the living.

Some say this is sexy, some say
never will they take, but I wait
days and days to see the peregrine falcon fly low
to snatch up the unsuspecting.

The life-flight helicopter stirs the snow
of the hospital roof to a whirlwind.
We are in the globe. The frozen dancers

inside the glass never ask
what will we eat where will we sleep,
let alone, how will we love without hurting?

Claws in your back? Big deal.
I was carrying you.
You were feeding me.
I thought we both agreed.

See-And-Know-This

2010-03-06T20:16:00.009-05:00

Ceanothus

What is it?

The privilege to kiss these lips
Any.
Time.
I Want?

The license to look once over all over all about ownership and not and all in time and not and say this is me and not and mine and not and right now, it's not

hurting

how ______ is a mirror

a rain puddle I can look down upon to see myself with wings of a rainbow arching out of my side behind my eyes inside the vibration of concentric circles that radiate out of my fingertips when I reach down and touch the illusion for real for what seems like real or sunlight and motor oil or maybe glitter eyeshadow in my lash playing tricks on my mind, whatever the surface, it's calm and I can't tell you the last time

I loved myself so purely.

Braving the emptiness inside, seeing the lies that led me there to what was called "love" before

is now land. I fell hard and hit the ground running because the ground is solid and real and never cares who I'm crying about

and this love is full of creatures who respond to my heart, my heat, all over my skin they crawl and come with wings and want

nothing more than I can give. Remember when we both confessed and agreed

that we sometimes saw flowers unfolding
when we came
and sometimes our desires were so dirty
and both were ok, natural?
Define it.

See it and know it.

Cricket in my shoe, stay overnight. The ladybug larvae who came home on my clothes, but didn't make it. The possum who watched me pee under the moon that was full, the desires we have but keep secret: to the reality of you, not the divinity: we are waxing and waning still. We are still

here. We survived this, me

and my body
on earth.

The water was cold in the creek, but how could I not submerge myself?
I want you so bad.

Cricket Medicine

2010-03-02T14:18:00.003-05:00

Ink and Spit Portrait in my journal. Me watching Quin watch a film I just couldn't watch. Sacred Heart moves radical love of land and earth and sacred respect of plant medicine and all creatures outward while horrific images of industrialized food production and corporate greed move inward. Both Blessed and Cursed are those who know.

Mugwort

2010-02-26T13:19:00.026-05:00

When the fresh air and open sky scares you, tears you up, a little, tears you open- there are no words, but who needs them? I will never tell you how I feel. There is aloe growing in the backyard. There are vultures circling above, so there you go- you won't be wasted if you lay down and bleed out into the earth's open eyes. Let her decide, let her see you this vulnerable, let anyone. There is infinite space and even more living beings flying around in every breath, crawling through the dirt, landing on your skin. The bees buzz childhood through the broccoli gone to seed. There are oranges and avocados falling fresh from the trees. There is a girl named Willow on a bike who says do you smell the sweet grass? There is a boy who brings you lupine and sunflowers on your first night. There is sex, it is slow, and then sleep like death, that is, peace, and every time you resurrect, you hear wind rustling the leaves outside and the rat in the wall makes a place for her babies and the boy rubs your back to let you know he is with you. You walk out into the dark to piss in the dirt and above the shed there are two raccoons two feet above your head watching you through black masks and the moment of seeing, the darshan, is so intense, the connection, it's like suddenly you aren't split open, you are hummingbird sage, you are safe. To the pure all things are pure and it is so good to be good, this seeing, their eyes, their no eyes- it's like falling in love and out again at once and everything intense and beautiful and cruel that could have happened didn't, or did in a heartbeat too quick to be counted, and the fearless, living stares aren't human. They don't concede. They don't insult. They don't stop until you all part ways- they crawl to the compost pile for food, you walk out under the moon for a drink of light and it's just you and your lifetime. You are just rootless or maybe growing in water, lotus body, grabbing for mud and sky at once and yes, beautiful girl, God loves you, the Calendula told you so, the medicinal good mornings, the naked bodies, the dirt road, the air, the claws that tear, tear, and eat up flesh and blood and bone with only the best, most natural intentions. It's only a day. It's good- this tea

traditionally

used

for dreaming.