There can't be sharks in chlorine water.
Dip toe just to be sure it's ok,
The temperature, anyway.
Always, always, picking at everything..
Just give in and swim.

The fear of sharks in poisonous water:
give all of your hopes away.
Soon is coming the day when
You'll dive right in to uncover
The true fiend lying in plain sight
Underwater..

Emptiness

Women
are not mysterious.

We are not shrouded
in cloaks made from the night sky.

We are not anomalies
or irregularities in the data.

Our nature has been hidden
from men, by men.

We have not been studied;
Not extensively, thoroughly, over centuries.

Not the way men have been, either.
There was no equal footing in
analyses.

Women were test subjects, when men were patients.
When we were "relevant" at all.

This pattern literally kills us quicker.
In medicine, and love.
In the office and the bedroom.
In the workshop and the nursery.

In the kitchen.

In the kitchen.

Some food for your soul:

Everyone is magical.
You don't need a pointy hat and a ******.

Everyone is intellectual.
You don't need spectacles, white skin, or a *****.

Everyone is environmental.
Just go outside.

You just need to be you.

Subscribing to the binary
and rejecting it completely:
One ties your hands,
the other your feet.

Be all the parts of you. Then you can feel
Whole.

did you know
we are made
of stardust?

a million wishes
are made upon
our bones
our eyes
and our blood

every night we see
a part of ourselves
dotted in a technicolor sky

every day we bid
those stars a good bye
until the night comes again.

how dependant
we seem to be
on stars.

how dependent
we are on
each other.

It's over, its done ...

American Christianity stumbles forward
toward a cruel topsy-turvy world where
help is weakness, compassion is cruelty
& divisive isolation is preferable to
welcome & concern.

American Christianity is a corpse that reeks,

a veritable Walking Dead of pink-tied
Conservatism that picks its leaders
based on a sort of simple country-boy
belief that a fat white man in a suit who
holds aloft his momma's old bible while
same the same time preaching division,
exclusiveness, hate & bigotry is somehow
the best Christian choice & God loves that
man so,

they do this,

they continue to do this,

this rural fundamental upside-down way
of seeing the worst man as the best man
just because he spouts for some phrases
& gets all blessed & such by richly dressed
ministers of the lord who anoint him as the
Chosen One, which is so far off the mark
as to leave one wondering who? who?
who are these representatives of God's
word on earth,

these shiny shoe lackeys, these fork-tongued
well-heeled sybarites closer to Lucifer's
world of consumption & the almighty dollar,

American Christianity should just call it
a day, just give over for awhile, take a
breather & read a book or two, for the
harm they cause to fall on the rest of
us through their ignorant vision is just
way, way too much for them to be able
to claim any affinity with Jesus
the humble Son of God.

you still exist
in the crinkled pages of my notebook.
last autumn i dog-eared the top corners so i would find my way back.
your veins dance with the curves and loops of my
frail
frail
words.
the contours of your dreams lay in the indents of my ballpoint pens.
your fears bleed black and blue.
your voice--the raspy scratching of graphite before bed.
my sentences often sit incomplete because that's how you left--
in the middle
without warning
because you lacked a single transition.
your breath echos at the turn of every page
inhale--look back
exhale--look forward
(i can almost feel your lungs working alongside my own).
your blood runs red as i scribble across the pages--
at times i am in a frenzy, lacking control as my hands skirt along the paper.
other days, i am silent, waiting for my hand to pick up the pen
and bring you to life.

i keep telling myself that
you still exist
in the crinkled pages of my notebook
but
every time i close its covers shut,
i can't seem to find you.