......Finding the words
                            to describe the feelings.....

                        Just by moving through the ocean

Inside, I am swimming,
swimming to get away,
swimming to come home
to what I knew.
I know I can never be the same again
Knowing  what I know now.

I feel the hollow dust of
of confusion
swirling inside me
I feel my impossibility---

like I am trying

to catch

each dust particle:

every old idea I have ever had,

before it lands and

makes me sneeze --only to blow

all the dust particles back into chaos,

so I hold my breath....



.....pause....

....breathe in.....

...exhale ....s  l  o  w   l  y .......

.....embody this moment....

and become, one who CAN.

...leave this terrestrial moment....

...and go into the water....


And when I imagine
I am the whale,
I am the vastness within and around
I can just breathe and swim

I catch
all the plankton spinning in chaos
after they have been
cast into the ocean currents
and the plankton come to me,
the plankton feed me
one by one--
I can fill my belly
with all these
            d o t s              o   f
                    f     o     o      d
Gathering, harvesting,
plankton combing through my baleen,
I am fed, I am nourished,
just by moving through the ocean.
I am free.

That's what my name is
my given name,
that is

it means Natural Spring
(of water)
but,
it does not mean it's me

How can a name,
given to you
                    by those
who never truly saw you,
belong to you?

It belongs to them.

as does Pinar,
                  the girl that's molded to their liking
                  the safe girl, the one who is never a risk
                  the girl who receives love, when she plays by the rules
                  the girl who serves as a mirror, of their own merits
                  the girl whose duty overrides her every desire
                  the girl whose soul screams, but no one is there to hear it
                  the girl that exists, only around them

MY name, good sir,
is
Penny

It is a name given to me by a six-year old girl
it felt true, to be seen by the eyes of a child
to be graced, by that purity
with a name to call my own

                                   Penny.

A name given, innocently
and so I claim my true name be
Not what was given to me,
but was seen,
of me

--PY