Today the radio’s tell me what to write.
They demand my attention,
Screaming tragedy,
And new growth.
Talking to children who speak of fear and loss,
But are really just quoting the tears in their parents eyes
Because their own abstract grief has long since been eclipsed
By schoolyard heartbreak, that is infinitely more rooted in their reality.

Today the TV tells me exactly where my mind should be.
So I follow that course, but end up somewhere I cannot even picture.
Maybe it’s because I still don’t really understand what happened
Any better than I did at seven.
And other people my age seem to know so much more,
But I kinda think their just pretending
I mean they talk of the architectural faults and induced implosion
But they can never tell me how it feels to burn and crumble.
9/11/11
Today the radio’s tell me what to write.
They demand my attention,
Screaming tragedy,
And new growth.
Talking to children who speak of fear and loss,
But are really just quoting the tears in their parents eyes
Because their own abstract grief has long since been eclipsed
By schoolyard heartbreak, that is infinitely more rooted in their reality.

Today the TV tells me exactly where my mind should be.
So I follow that course, but end up somewhere I cannot even picture.
Maybe it’s because I still don’t really understand what happened
Any better than I did at seven.
And other people my age seem to know so much more,
But I kinda think their just pretending
I mean they talk of the architectural faults and induced implosion
But they can never tell me how it feels to burn and crumble.

The sky has broken this morning.
Swelled, stirred, and burst its bounds, cascading from the stars to my door step.
I know it will vanish, evaporate with the cruel bright sun,
But for now it seems far from fleeting.
Let me show you.

Mist still hangs heavy from the night.
Only now it’s been stained, dyed by some careless celestial hand.
A deep, probing blue, which, suspended by mist, veils the hills and accents the trees green.
It invites you to run, vanish like the horizon into the cobalt dark.
Let me show you.

So tangible is the indigo tapestry,
That you want to gather it in your arms, infuse it into your skin, and return no different than the sky.
You want to steel it, hide it for yourself, throw your life away to become a blue *****.
Its looks so palpable you can’t bear to disturb it, to face its actual evanescence.
Let me show you.

But already the sun has permeated its edges,
Staining the flawless dark with canals of weak, tepid, periwinkle.
With day fast approaching the mist begins to disperse,
But with a final hurrah of undiluted grandeur it thins leaving the hills tinted with the sky.
Let me show you.

The sun by now has done too much damage for the blue to be recognizable,
Though a watered down version still clings to the western tree tops,
The clearest blue now lives in my head, a memory of a broken sky,
Lost to those who don’t know where to look, forever gone, unless…
Let me show you.

I cut my pennies in half to toss them down the wishing well,
It only takes half a wish to get me started.

Sometimes I am a table.
A flat surface on which people pile their extra ****.

Today I came home,
If that word still means anything.

I tried to imagine leaving,
And all I could think of was coming back.
It’s not so much that the idea of departure frightens me,
I can easily imagine existing somewhere else,
I just cannot picture my home existing without me,
Call me self centered if you will.
Just answer me this,
What would become of my room?
There is so much of me in there,
Permanent fixtures that would annoy anyone.
My friends painted on the walls,
Ink staining my carpet,
The broken power outlets, used to such extent that all cords must be at a certain angle to work,
To me these things mean home,
To anyone else they would be annoyance in need of repair.
I think of all the effort it would take to expel my presence from my room,
The repainting, recarpeting, redoing, just to get me out,
Would it be worth the effort?
Then I think of the holes I’ll leave behind me.
The books I’ll have to take with me,
Because leaving even one dog-eared whether worn volume is an utter impossibility.
That alone will leave my room nearly empty.
What about the smell of a freshly baked dessert
Will my pie tins be forced into early retirement?
Or even worse,
Will my lovely dishes be sold?
Given to someone who doesn’t appreciate their scorch marks and abundant cracks.
Will my parents try to fill my rickety bookshelf with their own alien tombs?
The thought disgust me, like if someone else were to use my toothbrush.
But worse than the holes I’ll leave are the things I cannot take with me,
The view from my window,
The prodigal richness of my meadow in spring,
The sledding hill in winter.
For every season, very month, practically everyday there is some joy,
Will I ever be able to recover from the loss?
Yet the core of my being seems to call me away,
Begs me to ascend beyond this cluttered and twisted reminiscence of childhood,
This broken version of a shrinking paradise, to small, to old, to painfully familiar.
Is that what home really,
Somewhere so lived in you cannot bear to leave,
or comprehend staying?

Oh laughing maid of carefree days held in sunlight’s last embrace,
You’ve shed your hues of emerald green,
Dawned earthy tones and hide your face.
Behind a veil of falling leaves,
I no longer see sweet summer’s blush,
Gone is she that twined the flowers,
And brought forth the warbling hymn of the thrush.
The winnowing winds replace your song,
Scattering mortal leaves away,
As billowing clouds condense above,
You cannot keep the cold at bay.
Beneath your new bower of crisp pine,
You sit enthroned in gold and red,
Gone is the laughing child of the sun
A regal woman sits in her stead.
Yet do not mourn for what you were,
Stately autumn holds a new delight,
You hang ripe fruit upon the tree,
And paint the ground with ice at night.
And if perhaps you still while away,
Dreaming of the mirthful joy lost,
Know that the sweet girl of the light,
Will be borne again from winter’s frost.

I reassemble,
The wind flows backwards to your hands,
I am returning from whatever version of “beyond” you choose to believe,
Each particle caring a manifest blessing back with it.
Perhaps tears flow up your face, retracing the progression of grief down your cheek.
Or maybe I was an awful at the end and in rewind you whisper “dead is ***** old that god thank.”
But either way that is the past… or the future,
It isn’t prudent to examine such distinctions now
It’s movement not direction that matters.
My form is re-forged by fire,
My bones smoothing in the heat
My flesh hardens from liquid to coalesce around my uncooking muscles,
And still I rewind,
Personality and character drifting through the cobweb wrinkles of my skin,
Till somewhere in the dynamo of my body my heart finally beats its last “*** ba”… and then it’s second to last.
How strange is a life lived backwards?
Would words taste different in my mouth, have new meaning in rewind,
Would I find satanic messages in my everyday phrases or just speak in nonsense, a string of “a-blah-blah” that takes too long to be made sense of.
How different would my actions be?
My hands could peel away bruises,  unbreak eggs, and **** insults out of the air
Yet who would be responsible for these miracles,
Some dreadful foreword version of myself.

Each morning as I brush my teeth I crack open my skull and allow the world to gorge on my brain.
I lay my thoughts on a table and watch as people dawning forks and knives pick through the vittles of my mind.
They dive in with the blind enthusiasm of a fat man near lunch time passing a McDonalds,
With no care to the actual contents of their mouths just the meaningless relief of being full again.
And each day they devour my ideas with the entitled right a kid feels towards cake on his birthday,
Not grateful just sure that by being born he deserves this.
And the soup **** in me wonders,
Maybe if they crawled to me in defeat, an anorexic succumbing to the lure of chocolate,
Or with genuine interest, a food critic sampling the gourmet fare,
I would be happy…
Or feel a little less used.
I mean most days I just want to feed myself and I don’t know how my brain turned into a free soup kitchen.
And I guess I just have to choose whether or not to hand my ideas out like bagged lunches or can them up with preserves.
But I cannot decide because it doesn’t make sense.
They resent the hand that feeds them,
But feel robbed of human rights if denied a meal.
And no one really cares about the cook anyway.
Yet each morning I brush my teeth and crack open my skull, wondering if today it will make me feel a little more full.

I am from worn out measuring cups where the numbers no longer show,
From years of guessed quantities and over sugared cakes.
I am from cracked blue paint,
And the mantra “we’ll get a new coat next year.”
I am from the cow peas, crop circling, and honeysuckle vines ornamented with butterflies.
I am from Grandpa’s tobacco yellowed hands, Grandma Doll’s old wives tales,
From “eat your bread crusts and your hair will curl,”
And from “your face just might stick like that.”
I am from morning walks and the sylvan veil of moss,
From meandering trails and the drip of rain on leaves.
I am from Otter Pops, and bright blue tongues.
I am from cassette tapes, now left in the back of the closet to grow antique.
And VCRs,
From Monsters Inc. and Totoro.
And I am from the worn bindings of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Velveteen Rabbit.
I am from the meadow,
From searching for fairies, and sometimes even finding them.
And from the whispered promise “I’ll dream of you and you’ll dream of me…”
I am from the babbling gurgling creek, from the itch of nettles and the deep earthy scent of loam.
I am from the cat in Alice in Wonderland,
From Jacob and Leah’s wronged daughter.
I am from the Xanadu, the Akela, and the Dynamite,
From the crack of sails and the swing of the boom.
I am from placid seas and the rushing tumult of rain,
From heavy grey skies and flaming sunsets painted in watercolor across the Olympics.
I am from the pink syringe and the old blind dog’s last breath,
And I am from the hole where we laid her.
I am from the evergreen planted in the frozen ground to the sounds of my first cry,
That tree whose limbs witnessed my first breath, whose lofty trunk now stands as a testament, a marker, of where I am from.

I will leave,
You will close your eyes and I will vanish.
Call me Houdini,
I will escape from this,
Snap the manacles of your ignorance,
Unwind each sentence of apathy you’ve wrapped around me.
I will take the gag of society out of my mouth
And I will speak the words you are so afraid of hearing.
You thought they were too heavy for me to bear,
But I will make my tongue a wrecking ball
Smash through your delusions
And not even turn to see if you’ve escaped the wreckage.
Call me a monster,
I am one
Now.

For those days when there aren’t words to be said, because all I feel is “I miss you.”
We haven’t looked for definitions and I won’t start.
And for the times when in a veil of smoke I melt into a ring and live a hundred years in the cycle of consciousness through my twisted form.
Then you touch me and I’m free.
For those nights when the stars are closer to my thoughts then your mind could ever be,
But I don’t know how say that I love you anyway.

You left me tracing pictures in the water,
With my fingers, and my tongue, and my hair.
And while you left I thought I walk on water.
you returned, I was no longer there.

And you thought that you could dive down to catch me,
You thought you saw my face far in the deep,
But darling, you didn’t need to catch me,
not everything can forever keep.

And I’m so sorry that I lead you to the water,
Because I know you never learned to float,
While your lungs burned, searching neath the water,
I was cradled, rocked to sleep, in a row boat.

I thought at first that you had come to save me,
Because you never stooped searching neath the surf
But I wonder if you really came to own me,
Because you needed to poses something of worth.

You should know that either way “I miss you”
Because my whim has left you lost somewhere at sea
And maybe someday I will find you,
Washed ashore with all the other beach debris.

But for now I’m tracing pictures in the water,
My hands following ripples in my wake,
Because I know somewhere off beneath the water,
You can feel my fingers dancing on the lake.

My mama's eyes say " these are lean times,"
But when she speaks there is no shame,
we will make do.
Yet there is the shadow of fear in the set of her mouth.
It is a fear I might almost understand.
She is afraid, not that we will lose what we have,
but that someday,
I will ask for more,
more to see,
more to read,
more to learn,
more to feel,
more to dream about,
and hope for,
and she will have to be the one to say no, "these are lean times."

In the glass each day,
I meet myself waking,
Together we watch,
Both I and my mirror self.
Till one of us turns to leave.

If the stars didn’t move would they matter to me?
My eye is drawn to action, to journeys, and stories,
To the leap, and bound, and slipping back down and then rising up through.
I scan the night sky to view the moment when darkness is filled with light,
When the swing of Ursa Minor fills the emptiness of stars too far away to see.
Even If, from my rooftop, the movement seems infinitesimal when measured in the span of each breath and heartbeat,
I know somewhere each point hurtles by in a stream of fire a million times faster than my thoughts or eyes
And I just cannot get close enough to see it
But each time I blink new darkness turns to light and each passing breeze that stirs my mind away misses the transformation back.
How can I ever make up each instant I let pass?
My eyes can only stay open for so long.
I’ll slow the time down with smoke and the mirrored reflection of the sky in your eyes,
But then the loss of each second is only more acute.
And my being is razed in each second I cannot raise my eyes.

Yet from this rubble new words can grow,
New thoughts spring to mind,
My feet can continue wandering,
And my eyes continue searching,
Till I begin to wonder is it the movement that captures me or the holes between each ***** of light.
In the space there is the conviction of the dark and the empty room to question.
So wrapped in a blanket and my own curiosity I sit till dawn
Screaming wordless prayers to the cosmic dynamo,
Imprinting nights behind my eyelids,
And mapping constellations in my finger tips,
The muscle memory of arms extending to embrace the outlines of the stars,
Even as they dance away.
So I stare into that void, forever hoping and fearing that whatever stares back will remain silent and allow me to continue searching for one… second… more

The ocean was illuminated
A myriad of glowing tendrils sparking from my feet,
Up my spine.

Wading in,
I am an island, my legs glowing pillars against the dark water,
A spec in the night.


All over the bay, fish move in glowing arcs,
But am I the only shining girl, shivering in the water,
Walking on stars.

At shore waves lap against the beach,
Exploding in a second of salt scented light, before streaming back to sea,
Leaving dark wet sand.

And when I to leave shinning grains cling to my feet,
Creating glowing foot prints in my wake,
To fade with day brake and the tide.

I remember when I use to have sunflowers instead of hair and butterflies were always landing on my head as if I was their own mobile home.
I never went to the barber but our landscaper would take his shears out whenever he came over and prune me, and I would sell the sunflowers at the end of our driveway out of a cardboard box stand. One buck a bunch.
Instead of shampoo I used fertilizer mixed in with the water I would sprinkle on my head each night from the tin watering can I kept under the sink.
In the summer I would lay in the sun to photosynthesize,
And I would leave home with a crown jungle of green stem and yellow peddle,
My personalized jungle.
In the winter I went bald,
Except maybe some brown droopy stems with wilting flowers that would shed their peddles whenever I got flustered, or laughed too hard, or cried.
When I was 14 I got tired of boys pulling out my hair to ask a girl to prom.
So one night I plucked out each blossom, one by one,
Until my arms were full and my head was bare.
I sat down and picked out each peddle, one by  one,
“He loves me” “He loves me not.”
The sunflowers never grew back after that,
Whatever part of me made them grow was gone,
I no longer have the seeds.
And now I sometimes sit in gardens,
And wonder if the bees recognize me.

I listen to my parents try and indoctrinate my brother with their beliefs,
And I listen to him fail to find the words to express that he too has ideas and thoughts and values,
he too has things he wants and needs and dreams about.
I see the frustration of being old enough to love but not old enough to control
and I listen to him fight till his eyes are red rimmed and his voice is spent because that is what he can give to his cause,
to whatever he chooses to stand up to.
And I don’t agree with him, because I don’t see heaven on a computer screen, but I do see heaven and I know what I see is worth fighting for and he knows that too.
So when he slams the door to his room and screams because he still hasn’t found the words and is being to question whether they exist
I listen to my parents lament his addiction, his obsession, his passion and wonder what they truly want,
because who are they to judge what should be of value to his life.
and the reasons they spit in his face, detachment from reality and consumer products
could describe each book they love me for reading,
each TV show that started out a guilty pleasure but snuck into their daily routine,
and who gets to draw the line.
And maybe that's what parenting is, drawing unwanted lines,
but the fact still remains that he cannot find his voice to fight the logic he sees holes in.
and I wonder again what they want,
for him to be filled with the words they use,
the ideas they value,
the dreams they choose
Because then they should buy a parrot.
Because they need to realize that his anger, angst, and rebellion
is just a search for expression.
and as I listen to my parents try and indoctrinate my brother
I pray that he won’t be the convert,
because as ugly as heresy can seem,
God forbid the day he stops standing up for what he believes in.

I fill my soul, my heart, my head,
And then try, through my fingers,
To tame it, calm it, dilute it.
To take the raw and make it something less agonizing,
To hold, to clutch to myself, to weave into my skin,
I build a fire and hope it won’t burn all the way through me, and the floor as well.

There are the times when I revel in the glow.
And there are times when I consign myself to be nothing more than a pillar of ash,
Easily swept away by a passing brezze.
Yet to cease,
Is to unweave my core,
To let holes stretch,
Till I am more void then girl.
To never feel a blue so mesmerizing that its very existents taunts me to catch it on paper,
Never spend hours trapping butterfly wings on the tip of my pen.
Never see the subtle moments where life is gut wrenchingly, woefully, utterly, complete,
That fraction of a second where the sun breaks the clouds into a sea of many facetted pillars of amaranth , so tangible I second guess their existence, and turning back see that the sun has sunken beyond the horizon.
The instant where a man and his dog glance up in perfect unison, a single being with six legs, four eyes, and one heart.
A first flash of scarlet upon jade, the cherries hang ripe and inviting, tiny globes flashing from behind their leafy bower, as of yet untouched by bird or clumsy human hand.
And so I write.

I watch my father tear my swing set down,
Standing on a chair to see out the window,
From my upstairs room.
in the effort of pulling up the polls,
The one remaining swing swung.
Though years had passed since I had loved it,
A part of me felt the loss.
The flecks of paint from where a childish hand had outlined my name,
And the squeaking sound from where the lose boards rubbed.
As I saw it in pieces,
I realized that it was never just a swing set,
It was a pirate ship,
A time machine,
A princess’s tower,
A home for the odd assortment of toys,
And memories.
Each board use to hide the rigging of ships,
Or buttons that when pushed could send one to the moon.
The swings where vines in a jungle,
They where airplanes,
Or life boats lost at sea.
I watched my father hoist up the last remaining beams,
And load them into his truck,
How could that car every move under all the weight?

We lay hammocked in the breath of passing angels,
Who had no time to stop for us.
Our voices running circles around all we wouldn’t say but understood anyway,
Your hand pressed in the small of my back.
I needed time to slow down
But I couldn’t even slow my heartbeat.
And I wouldn’t look you in the eyes because then I wouldn’t know how to look away.
So I memorized your eyelashes.

You think I should try to change the world.
To start climbing this insurmountable
Problem.
To scale it until I either fall off
Or have to stop and just cling on
Because it only gets steeper the higher you go,
And is their even a top?

Is that how it should be?

And haven’t we had our chance?
Perhaps it would be better to just move aside,
Lay down whatever we’ve taken with us,
Misunderstandings
Machines
Words
Ideas
Hate
Love?
What would we still have?
So maybe I don’t want to change the world.

Or if I must
I want to change just one small thing.
Only it would be so slight
No one but me would noticed
And I’d never tell.

Would it matter?
One blue pixel
On a blank red screen
Or a bottle
Lost among the waves.
If hope falls in a forest alone
Does it make a sound?
And if it does,
How far can that sound travel?

You think I should try to change the world.
You’re probably right.
But at this instant I can only pray,
That this country’s wiring
And this world’s spark
Is intact enough
That when I flip just one small switch,
Somewhere a light turns on.