I think about you every time I’m washing dishes.

I don’t know what about washing dishes, in almost any sink, but especially when the sun shines through the window, brings me so readily back to your high rise a decade past…

When we were just friends, not even lovers, not even enemies yet.
Not detractors, deceivers, or responsible for each others pain yet…
as far as we knew.


I used to see you in everything, every little mundane aspect of the physical world and life in it seemed to have a corollary to our time together.
Now it’s just the dishes. Every. Single. Dish.
Locked up in washing…a sense of care I wish to give to the world, to those I love.
The smallest gesture I am sometimes allowed to do for folks who are wrapped so hardly in their own cocoons of self-reliance, that even sometimes relinquishing a plate or bowl reminds them that they feel burdensome.
It’s my little action to hairline the shield wall. The tiniest ice pick, excavating a child within Pleistocene ice.

I used to think I could reach you with a song…
If only I had the courage to write one.
I wished I could boldly explore the depths of love in such grand gesture as lyricism, metaphor, or (god willing) harmony.
But rhythm to the risk averse is one-note.
And I can toss that in the chest of regrets, with all the other too-lates, not-enoughs, misunderstoods that I’ve collected.
But if I pull something out of there, and make it, In the wrong era, In a different key than I thought it should have been in, In spite of myself and in spite of you…
Will you listen to what I discover?
Well,
Doesn’t matter though,
I’m doing it anyway.
Here’s to…

“The lady at the unemployment office made me cry”



You said to me from a million miles away.


It cracked my spirit box open further so the light now shines around my tiny no-longer-dark room.


I open my eyes when I wake up and take in the shapes of things from my whole life.
I don’t know whether to feel comforted, terrified, old, young, abundant, alone, or a secret seventh thing.

I choose to feel all of them. And that felt like…me. And it felt like…relief,
like you felt when the lady in the unemployment office saw you as a person.
When someone inside of a system built to be difficult and dehumanizing humanized you and made it easier.
Relief, like so many never get to feel, no matter how bad I want them to.

My fingers gliss on tiny celluloid keys and moan with me in the agony of breaking branches as my tree ribs split and release a thunder through the ground and back up all the chimneys in my neighborhood. I am trying to hold a single note steady, but I was not made to mourn for the lost love of mothers and unmet brothers millions of miles away.
I cannot mourn for you this year, it is too big, I must already say goodbye to every child I have ever been, where is the space within this small box of a room?
My spirit box releases many me’s into the air, whirling wildly in a frenzy into the forest, the din cracks branches you use to climb when you were little, and now, and now, and now,
I feel relief.
You want to see struggling people get a moment of this.
The space to breathe.
The space for me.
I want to smile more.
I want to learn to cook.
I want to dance with people.
I want to share this everything I have yet to be.
I want to speak to strangers. I want to see the fear in their eyes as they see the fear in mine.
I want to see people who are struggling to get help find themselves again beyond the terrors.
I want to help.


You see me, you said, from five thousand miles away. You seem brighter, like a full moon.
It’s easy like that, to see, when you shine.
I know I can only collect so many boxes of souls…and that all containers are temporary,
like my room.
I scream, and inside the sound is more love than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I’m becoming the ocean again.
In this life is everything you could dream of.
Swim with me.

I don’t know how to say it.
You know I only have one word for this.
Ineffable.
There’s a reason You've inspired so Many instrumentals.
Prelinguistic feelings in the strings.

Sensory one. Out in the night.
Just to catch a bit of the cold and
hold
it
in wonder.

It’s been too long since I’ve loved someone this fast and fully and requited.
I feel the edge of a selfish obsessive nightmare,
hard and calloused scar tissue.
A long, old wound that I tried to peel. To open. To uncover.
To admit. To accept.
Examining every gut and thinking “wow, I’m really full”
It’s still tender to touch

I’m reminded of it when you hold me. When we make love.
I can feel obsessed. Fully dominated, To behold you.
To kiss someone so incredible.
It boggles my mind that life is allowed to feel this good.

That’s why I worry in the space between.
I am afraid of being blind. Sense-deafened to the color of red, or the shape of flags, or the temperature of a storm, or the habit of huddling together to survive it...even if it never comes.
Codependency. Enabling irresponsiveness. On the rocks.

How is this little life of mine?
Seeking deep interdependent connections with clowns.
An arms-length attachment with a masseuse of the wound.
Where does pain come from?

Journey toward security:
We play so easy. I feel like kids with you. I feel like its after school
and we don’t want the sun to go down
because if the sun goes down
we have to go inside
so we don't want the sun to go down
so we don’t have to come inside.


Come inside. And stay awhile.
I am warm and full of love.
My bones are made of cosmic dust.
My eyes are explosions and I am a constellation.


Or stay out.
Gaze at the stars.
Catch the cold.

and tell me how it feels.

It was a hot day when we departed,
A fuming day in the land of Ashes,
Hazy from the smoke of a fire three towns over.
All day felt like sunset.
Beautiful.
Inescapable.
A thick air and a thick knot in my stomach that began to unweave itself as we let go of each other.
Years of twisting and intertwining fibers
wrenching and writhing away from their shared center.

Warm, overwhelming, I'm-going-to-be-sick feeling.

Breathing deep lungfuls of haze and hot air.
Filling up the painful places in my body.
Exhaling all the life you breathed into me over so long.
Nothing to do but embrace a slow and sweetly inevitable
death and rebirth process.
My god it hurts.
Nothing to be done besides hurt.
Cry a little. Just to cool down my flustered cheeks.
Nothing to be done besides
feel the emptiness that has formed between us,
and gaze into the abyss beneath the burning bridge.
Feel the knots unformed in the safety rope round our waists.
Orbiting without a tether.
Lovely little dreams of freedom.
Infinite frictionless momentum.
Eventually.

I'd like to enjoy the feeling of freedom.
Of release.
Of forgiveness.
But death is always painful, even as it frees us from suffering.

There is a terrible storm raging outside
and I am here, and I am alive.

My skin is dry and cracked and bleeds from the smallest friction
and I am here, and my body works to replace the forsaken flakes,
and I am alive, and feelings the pain of touch.

I have valued myself, yet again, dependent upon the reception of another who I cannot speak to, or speak of, for no one quite understands obsession and self-love as two suits of the same card.
and I am here. and I suffer. and I quell screams. And I stew a soup deep inside that could feed millions of children whose parents didn't want them, who weren't ready, or who wanted them too much for selfish reasons. I bring a ladle to my lips every few weeks to test the seasoning. I burn the taste buds off my tongue every time. I keep the fire going.

and I am alive, underneath all of this callous and scar tissue, pointing out the stars that still our myths depend on for direction, ******* in sugar like a hummingbird whose body has grown too fat for its wings, the energy needs to move this bloated body growing ever higher.

i still sing to myself, for comfort and joy.
i still listen for familiar sounds to remind me of the stories I've told.
i still dream.
I'm still me.
screaming inside
hoping to be heard
lonely from being inside myself so long.
waiting for the lock to rust and break.

I felt trapped in an endless single moment of time.
Nothing was real except the deafening silence of the dynamic between my mother and father and the lie of a white picket fence we had been gritting and grinning our teeth to trick the world into building for us.
Every thing slipped slowly backward, as in a dream of falling down hill, not quite real enough to feel the fall, but not grounded enough to move away.
If it were not for daily walks in the nearby almond orchard, I would Not have known that the grass still grew in the spring. I forgot that the spiders still built webs that were taken down each new rain. I forgot that the bees were kept, and that people were fighting addiction in order to make it home to see their nephews.
I found freedom in the silence at some point. A sandbox world for me to wander in, no real consequences to my actions. It was a loneliness like the womb. Eventually I tried to escape. Many escape attempts. How many miles put between me and that room? How many cars busted down on the side of the road, running away from home. I discovered new worlds I never knew could exist. I watched the leaves turn in different biomes. I made love to other lonely people, unhappy and afraid of the world and their place in it,
not when we were together though.
together we were infinite, real, in awe of the fact that we could be so
unmasked.
naked and unafraid.

I watched the masks of my parents relationship deteriorate with
the advent of disease and age.
I watched the pain and patterns of abandoning I had felt my whole life play out in their pantomime before me, day after wretched day.

I stared at a wall.
I slept with my guitar.
I slept with more lonely people with perfect hearts.
I invested in the means to transmute all these...feelings...into art, audiovisual storytelling, and physical creativity.
And once I had built a temple to my pain,
I boarded the doors and windows. I never went inside.
I just sat on the stoop, obsessively trying to work out all of the world's problems- my problems as an inextricable part of the world- by thinking.
If I could just strategize a way to never get hurt,
Then I wouldn't need to deal with the inconvenience of pain.
If I could concoct a cocktail of constant cope,
I could cruise forever without feeling the ocean
of space
between us
all.

If it were not for the orchard, I would have forgotten that frost formed on the ground. Even with the endlessly straight rows of trees, the square grid of houses, and the box-like hospital next door...a tiny twig out of place or a clover, remembered me that there is wild growth, that I am wild growth, unfettered and untethered by the paltry attempts at geoscaping.

Inland, I remember how vast the ocean is.



how vast




the space







between






us











all









and







­
still









still













still











Inland, I yearn for the ocean.
Remembering that I have always felt most free in the water.

This is an ever-refreshing circle of
long for-love-attach-suffer for

and when I eat food
they are the blandest meals
for I must avoid any taste of salt
because salt tastes like you...
and when I recall
how sweet
you are
I hurt


and I should not hurt.

if I don't hurt, i will not be deserted, and then i will not hurt.
circle logic.

at least it has a shape.
Otherwise, what form does a life take?
What sense does this world make?
And so, i stay, inside the circuit,
because I have not learned to lead myself away
and if I were to learn that I love myself,
and that I cause this hurt to myself,
I don't know how I could ever forgive me.