scaled your apartment in one of my favorite dresses
right before sundown
watched the wind billow the blue silk up my thighs,
parachute like
as i looked down,
several stories above your neighbors
(wonder if anyone looked up)
swallowed my human fear, counted the rungs
had opened our forties prematurely in your apartment
sure didn't make climbing any easier
that big map stretched out yawning across the bricks in your living room
spotted the city you were headed for
blame it on uninformed geography but didn't
realize you'd be completely across the country
(didn't tell you but
your cat kissed my nose from the bathroom counter
while i was peeing
and i thought it was one of the most endearing things
that probably ever happened to me)
got to your roof outta breath
all adrenaline and eyes
took off that big leather jacket lined with fleece,
wrapped it around our backs and sat
facing the city you'd be leaving and i'd be entertaining
watched the traffic crawl on the BQE
the sunset bored, you spilled your beer-
kept rolling in it innocently- stoned
laughing, god i just
wanted to keep touching you
couldn't decide what to eat
both didn't wanna impose
neither of us could remember the name of that tree
littering pink slippery offspring in spring
for you and me to exclaim fondness over
you were the birth of a simplicity
it was so
terribly easy to be happy

The rain washed a little of the grey away

Away with some of the disappointment and the turgid

Turgid feelings of abandonment and conflict

Conflict and all the other 'ents' washed away today  

Today with most of the negative things I had to say

Say anything to me now, I finally have my dream

Dream discovered, an attempt, recovered

Recovered if all dedication and zeal coalesce

Coalesce into the rebirth of my 'Ice-cream Truck'

Truck of dreams, 'bailey wick,' handing out wishing stars

Stars falling like a gentle soothing sleeping rain

Rain Washed A Little of the Grey Away, no longer insane.

Insane no longer at least not today coping coping

Coping in order not to run rabbit run away

I can’t help but utter a curse
Or two, after the strap of my purse
Breaks and my things begin to roll
On the floor. Or my cereal bowl
Decides that it wants to fly
Away from the counter and die.
When my computer shuts down
And my work doesn’t save, I frown
And want my laptop to feel my pain
Cuz I don’t want to type it again.
When I trip over air, but I swear
Up and down that there was something there.
When I stub my toe on something
And hop up and down yelping.

It’s the little things in life
That tend to cause so much strife.

Surprised. Impressed.
The first person he'd met
that went round museums and art galleries
faster
than him.

But it's simple:
I've never been comfortable
with pretending
to understand
things I don't.

Sometimes art shits me.

And sometimes it hits me:

a photo print and words
laying out bare on the wall
my worst
childhood fear.
Something
in those particular
rural small town
backwaters -
one street
petrol station
empty pub
store selling pies
and perhaps a pet shop.
...trapped...
...forsaken...
...end of the world at the end of the world...
8 year-old-me
tailspinning
into mini-depressions
lasting hours,
occasionally
coloured faintly
by a crumpled
$5 note in my hand
from ten or so 
baby white mice
I'd just sold.

And so - someone else
had felt it too
(minus the mice)
and could help me
name it.

It's said
that naming
is rarely easy
but that doing so brings
knowledge
and power
and freedom.

That’s why art.

I built a prison in my head
To house the trouble deep inside
And sentenced certain things to life
In dark confinement gagged and tied.

Kept on a level far below
Are aches and pain that never show
Still further down I keep the lies
In dark confinement from the light.

And sometimes I see just their i's
That look up to me high above
And painfully I realize
They are my biggest threat to love.

Do you want to live forever?
said the Gardener to me,
tending to a creeping thought
and watering the sea.

I replied, no, but thanks, you see,
I'd rather be a tree.
And spread my branches out
to
shelter creatures underneath.

A tree? A tree? He whispered tentatively.
Why, I can't remember what it be.
That word. That thought. That memory.
He shook his head and shrugged at me.

(So, I scratched a crude drawing in the dirt
and The Gardener squatted there, pondering at it a while.
His robes lifted up above his bony knees)

But I do that too, said He, jumping up quite suddenly.
Pardon me, but I just don't see the need.
The need to be a tree!
Just beg a princely role of me
and I'll fulfill your fantasy.
I said thanks..but.. well, you see,
I'd rather be a tree.

He paused for quite a while.
Then said okay, a little hesitantly.
Then said, that he would not be that okay
until he sees these silly things called trees,
and until he sees the purpose of the thing it is
that means so wonderfully much to me
to
want to be a tree.

So he turned me to a tree and put me in a park.
Where couples came and families
and cuddling lovers in the dark.
And colored birds were friends to me
and I sheltered all of them beneath.
And spread new life through little seeds
and quenched the world its need to breathe.
And in the autumn dropped my leaves
to feed the insects in the weeds.
I stretched my roots in
luscious ground and saw such beauty all around.
I was
old and happy as only a tree
could ever wish or hope
to be.
And then I saw that a familiar face was watching me.

And He said..

You are quite naturally a tree
and have done so extraordinarily well in green that I will let you be to live your dream.
And as he walked away,
he smiled happily back at me.

There was a reason I did what I did for a reason.
A reason the reason was there for a reason.
A reason for stopping. A reason. A thing.
And a reason to stop thinking reasons for things.
But the thing might still reason to thingstop and stop.
All this reasoning and then when the reason is got.
All the reasons for things I'll stop reasoningstop.
And just thingdrop my reasons.

The reasoning lot.

You will have a moon-faced child who is good at keeping secrets. She will be a piece of the the sea, ruled by the sun, and afraid of the dark. She will start to explore and never stop. More than anything, she will be frightened of being settled, getting stuck. She will say, "No, I will not", but at what cost? 

I have terrible nightmares. I dream that I am running, trying to defend my truths against immoral powers. In my sleep, systems corrupted by the complexity of control try to steal my simplicity, try to make me dirty and compliant, things I will never be. In my dreams I am persecuted time and again for things that make no sense to me. It is a feeling of choking claustrophobia, worse than any coffin. The injustice insults my soul, and I wake with heaving lungs and an aching heart.

I am obsessed with knowing myself. Maybe if I can understand that much, the rest of this will start to make sense. We'll see.

I worry. I worry about dentists. Pharmacists. Business marketing majors. The dispassionate masses. People content to do things for money. For little bits of green paper that aren't particularly attached to anything but false notions of power. I have no religion to reassure me that it will all even out on some other plane. I have here, I have now. I will not fritter and waste the hours that make up the dull day, I will not be made to be afraid.

It hurts my heart to see how easily my brothers and sisters accept the notion that we are destined to spend most of the precious hours of our existences working at jobs we don't care about just to stay afloat in a drowning economy, and how easily judgments are cast upon those who don't conform to such broken logic. It's easier to judge than it is to think. Thinking is so uncomfortable.

It makes me want to scream, to rant. Don't they see? We pave the way for each other to be lazy. We have created technology that we use to save time so that we have more time to spend on the important things, like trying to figure out how to get our hands on more money, so that we can buy more things. We aren't paid to create, repair, discover or teach. We are paid to entertain, not question. We survive by serving. And that's a little too close to indentured servitude, wouldn't you say? Planned obsolescence. Wage slavery. Stockholm syndrome. Electoral College. War on poverty. From the makers of Agent Orange, corn! And no, you can't heat up your burrito, you think you're fucking royalty? That's right baby, keep voting. You have a voice. You are free.

Our entire system is obsolete if the air we breath, the water we drink, and the food we eat are killing us because we've been so busy saving time that we forgot to remember not to poison ourselves. We create disease, and then spend lots of time and money "treating" it. Treating and treating and treating, fixing things by breaking things. Quality of life be damned, we want to live forever! It increases our GDP, don't you see?? When it's my time to go, plug me into a wall for a few years and then bury me in a big fucking box to make sure that the nutrients in my body won't feed the earth. Spend a lot of money on all of that. I will look down on you lovingly from my cloud, stroke my chin and proudly ponder my legacy. The end goal, it seems, is to die old and rich and fat, surrounded by things. To leave no mark of love on anything, not even our own hearts. It hurts my heart to see my people so removed from their selves and their truths that they think they are right.

So much of what I see around me hurts my heart.