Home-less-ness

Plenty are at perfect peace with their past. That is a private residence.
They always say they wouldn't want it any other way.
After all, it made them who they are today, and I guess tomorrow too.
Some of these people play the lottery, they have hope.
Of course, I am jumping too far ahead,
off a cliffhanger
I will backtrack seven paces-
_The gamble of being born, a sense of place you were told
Welcome and Home,
Home means Safe
You are always Welcome Here.

They say you can't win the jackpot unless you play the lottery.
They should say there is a winner and many losers, don't let chance decide.

My home felt bigger than the Heidegger house in which I dwelt.
My house felt like someone else's I was sitting in for safe keeping.
I never liked playing house.
__I was 11 when I became a woman, an elementary vixen, periodically out of my element.
___I was 12 when I received my first catcall. It was Spanglish which I didn't comprehend but felt the words like acupuncture beneath my summer clothes. I can still see his cigar brown skin thirsty for my foreign skin.
But I was safe.

We had a group home come to my little town.
____I was 13 when I was robbed of my first kiss, my girlfriends new boyfriend new how to speak in drooling tongues, his black eyes describing his wants.
But I was safe.
_____At 14 my green eyed boyfriend tried to kill me.
______At 16 a wizard tried to take me to Never Land forever,
I returned home despite his plans.
_______At 18 a professor told me all females fail his science class, he failed me,
I left home forever.

I took a gamble (I paid with free will)
I wait for my number to be called.

I wrote a poem as a little girl about suicide, it was loved.
As a woman I write poems about life, they are hated.

Now I am at Home wondering how I got
(out of)
Here
looking around, I fear nothing
is mine, like this borrowed time that cannot be returned.
I am Spent,
I am no longer safe.




Image titled 'The Way Home', By Cecile Walton, illustrator (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36668) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Articulating Plankton

'Tis nothing new that poets should speak with such passion that their syllables ooze with emphasis and project consonants that bounce off the walls, each whole word ending up stretching into its own elongated echo chamber.
And poets that use their hands like composers of the Sea Symphony, filling even the empty silence with so many notes the empty becomes loud. Knowing that to gesticulate is far too forceful, instead they demonstrate that a magic spell is made from thin air, naturally. Not of invisible nature, but so thin you could not see it until this poet who keeps trying to touch it and show it to you, to trace its outlines between the two of you...finds some semblance of rhythm and notices you hear it too.
A particular poet passionately appeals to professionals. The artists collar is colored blue for the speech, among his serious peers he evokes the voice of reason, a scientific observation posing clearly for the rational, logical and bromidic.
In the fields of ever altering change that is both constrained and contained by subjective experience,
Hypothesis are proposed: Problems are solved (ac-cord-ing to the values we plug in)

A poet is describing this brilliant oceanic phenomena as though it were a recently uncovered lyrical language, an opportunistic new found flow of vocabulary like rich nutrients abundant in the cyclical occurrence of upwelling.
Where every change is the constant, from the Galapagos, David Whyte ponders first deeply, the mixing of worlds...
Poets and scientists, the clash of temperatures where laws are asserted as theories and expression explodes into reaction, a fission of fusion striking agitated chaos which elicits sparks from his eyes, a magic trick. The eyes navigate around the work of art like a sailor at night on land, terrestrial in his element, grounded and in awe of bioluminescence of the sea that flickers gaseous royal blue arching splotches of the elusive green flash.
Bioluminescence, light of life in the language of liquid mixology from the shore, the poet writes the score and the scientist keeps notes.

“To my mind, the whole of existence and/or creation is actually trying to find an internal anchorage inside us which reflects its astonishing symmetry outside of us.” -David Whyte @PugetSoundTEDX-David Whyte @ PugetSoundTEDX

An additional note by David Whyte (also read aloud at TEDX Puget Sound):

Image By Shane Anderson [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Caught in a Web of Cliché’s

I.

Growing up in a small town made me want to travel.

Maybe it was the tall trees that made me believe growing up means moving out of the tree house and not letting roots sink in the same grove.

Then again, maybe it was all that camping as a kid. A taste of the gypsy life.

I have been lost in the woods, more than once metaphorically and twice physically.

Even with this experience under my belt I have wondered how one could successfully achieve getting lost when asked to, it's very difficult to plan. 

This is also sometimes called “running away”.

When I was 13, I boarded a Greyhound bus from Northern California to Colorado alone to see a boy whose family lived in Dot Zero, a decent place to start a life of discovery.

II.

Explorers have no fear of getting lost or of foreign objects nor of mythical creatures. Our imagination is able to create places and things better than reality, which makes it easy to overlook what you are seeking. Marco Polo was disappointed with the unicorn which is why explorers should leave their expectations in their own small towns. 

Explorers and Gypsies are not the same thing, one travels for leisure the other for survival, I forget which is which.

To Explore we are searching, seeking.

To Wander we are finding, discovering.

When one explores, they have plotted expectations and projections onto their mind map.

When one wanders, they discover what could not have been predicted. They find serendipity growing like fungi, strange exotic gems in dark places, like behind eyelids, noticing the smoothest stone and pondering how a rock can resemble a baby's soft cool cheek and not needing an answer from the rattling, gurgling creek. 

Echoes are nothing to fear.

Shadows remind us we are never alone.

III.

Near my desk there is a wooden square piece of art that features the quote, “Not all who wander are lost.”

That sign is everywhere. 

It does not tell one where to go but provides directions.

My step-father never graduated high-school since rock and roll guitar players 'don't need no education'. After battling some sort of “leukemia” or “cancer” and winning, he thinks he is wiser for it, that he was chosen to be stronger than X. 

It sleeps inside his body, he was chosen to finish learning his elementary lessons. 

On my last visit he had read an autobiography of some guitar player like Santana-living vicariously only costs $22.90 (Hardcover)-My stepfather regurgitated to me some profound thought from this book as though it were his own formulation of truth, something like "I may be religiously homeless, but I am spiritually at home" or maybe it was "I may not be religious but my spirituality is sacred," I don't know-each of those are cliché’s that you can hang a priest's robe on. I am not pro (being) found anyway.

In a class I took on Dante I used a paraphrasing of the last cliché about not being religious but my beliefs are sacred (in lieu of the hippie spirituality reference), a classmate called the comment "flap-doodle", I had to look that up. 

Sturgeon's Law applies to everything subject to subjectivity.

IV.

The movie Interstellar  was epic by definition. 

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down at our place in the dirt," says Cooper in the movie. 

"When you look up you see very different things than when you look down." Brian Greene noted this astute observation in his book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos”.

Perspective is subjective, Sturgeon's Law applies.

In the bold and daring movie, exploration is emphasized often as a noble goal, although its actually more like a noble gas. Evoking the explorer in us, provoking our inner pioneer, incanting Marco Polo, is laced with a venomous ingredient called "Manifest Destiny", a different type of MSG. 

V.

We just flew by Pluto, a decade too late for it to matter.

We are on our way to Mars to pee on it, put a flag on it, figure out where all that methane is coming from. Here on Earth science has theorized that methane is toxic hot gas, waste in excess, sounds like our type of environment.

VI.

Dark matter is still debated. How will they know when they bump into it? Will it resist or devour or pretend it doesn't care if we are there are here, or not?

Time travel will always be a thing. Travel will always be the thing that yields the highest interest for your time spent. 

Considering how often people dwell in their sweet memories, remembering has become a second home sweet home except the housing is free and everything works out better than anticipated.

Travel nudges us so we can remember how to use all of our five or six senses. 

Wandering is traveling without a destination, wandering is the journey, the view, the experience that takes you from who you were to who you are and possibly who you can become. Infinite paths open.

Of course “not all who wander are lost” but maybe the wanderers are still working on it. 

Looking up at the sky at night it seems like it should be easy to become lost in a sea of expanding infinity, our own atomic volume being relationally a speck of dust in the cosmic thrust of “things”.

Looking down at the “pale blue dot”-seeing pictures from Hubble of our luscious spinning planet amid black space and amidst astronomical violence it seems impossible to become lost on this little encased bubble of paradoxical paradise, the probabilities, the possibilities all seem finite and calculable, reasonable considering the underlying chaos. 

VII.

Looking down, I have seen the forest for the trees. As a frequent traveler among the deep woods, I have learned the architecture, heard the whispers, smelled spring leaps, and touched soft skin that also bleeds.

Looking up, I have seen just beyond what I cannot see, a speck of blue, a hint of the beyond, a sense that I am trapped inside with the trees, rooted and I reach and stretch with them. I have seen the trees for the forest just passing by.

I always stop to wonder why people keep wanting to get discovered, to make discoveries, to pee on planets, prove that dark matter notices us, to reverse or distort the time we created as anatomically correct-

and I have such a hard time getting lost, even in Dot Zero.

A pioneer sees the trees for the forest. 

VIII.

Not to lose perspective but if spacetime travel becomes human practice I see unlimited potential. 

If spacetime travel grows into fruition, the soul mate theory contained in the apple of knowledge just fell on Newton's head, dropping the singularity of the one and only right one dead. I’d hitch a ride on that bus. Kismet will never find me. Maybe I could become invisible, or is that dark matter? Does it matter if no one can see me? I guess it depends on your perspective.

Sometimes spacetime travel is called “running away”(with reality), theoretically.

Conditions are infinitely subject to change. Sturgeon’s Law always applies.

Image By NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17171) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Earth is noted by the arrow as seen from Cassini positioned near Saturn.

The New and Old You (Point of View)

She remains nameless and frozen. The fine features of her face, the depth of her eye sockets, the height of her forehead, her disappearing lips trace her likeness like a wanted sketch, someone like this, an outline of what we may be looking for, or need to find. Have you seen those police artists sketches that often resemble the Doe's? Hermaphroditic, androgynous, analogous but not amphibious, the shape of a polyglot. The lines are clearly marked, unlike those court reporters hasty chicken scratches, flippant and erratic spaces that bleed over lines attempting cartoonish movements in a blur of busy bureaucracy, a peak into the process not about the words. They hold no water dotted with the holes of the alibi, riddled between the plea if you could only see-the expression...
                                                               Here We see, told to look and the confident leading line, one you can follow and trust.       It is the line           requested when              hungry-
With clarity, simplicity, form that motivates the dot into a line, connecting past with the future.
You were Here!                                                                                                                                                                                                           Now-Look how far you've come!
Did you notice the lightness and inclusion of unshadowable detail. The afterthought, delicately doting on detail, adding a feather atop her head raising a hair of suspicion about her past and intentions now. A whimsical set of lofty strokes like musical notes, curled and poised in stale air in the not there of white. A tiny notation behind the tiny stroke that juts out but follows the flow, poised primly above the abbreviated arch of her button nose, stands a wisp of eyelash, stylishly profiled.
The neck of a lady lures lovers. With its silken simplicity it evokes other curves. The white remains stoic and fair among the occupation of black fur, wrapped and regal, coyly smelling the clouds.
Is she sad or being strangled by that choker?
Speechless and horrified, I spied the toothless hag whose eyes become her ears, her angular jaw devoured and transformed into a grotesque Jewess schnoz...I pause...
----Transfixing, blurring and re-adjusting my eyes with futile tries-----
to see only the Beauty and not the Beast, the pretty one to ogle, but the old lady boggles me with her hidden presence, they are both always there now in one. The future and the present connected by lines. As opposing as our black and white-words even act this way, misappropriated, misstated, re-propogated and positioned just so we know, our own indivisibility.
A drawing, art, is a polyglot. Art like music speaks. An image is placed in front of you, a view of your minds eye. It's meaning and subtle shapes, inclusions and omissions are your point of view...
Focusing on the eyelash they share, interminable, symbiotically, I continue to stare at this young and old pair, two in one, multi-face-ted, caricature pastiche of damsel and shrew that are both of you.

 “The line is a dot that went for a walk.”-Paul Klee

It's about Time

I'm sure you've learned that the Earth is mostly water. We've adapted to this quite well.
Learning how to sail (sale) on the Complacent sea, all of us are searching, wandering, floating or steering, flotsam, jetsam, breadcrumbs and footprints. We are biodegradable and unstable, when we break down we put up a fight. This is sometimes called resistance, or a rip current.
Currently, some of us are lost and some found a map, but nobody can translate it accurately. Symbolically, some shipmates glasses are half full with doubt, they'll never figure it out.
Whirled peas, Alumni from Dumbguy U., Co-Exist, lofty liberalism I insist is the same as Righteousness, with Tolerance thrown out. Left to fend for themselves, a baby learns to dog paddle with or without apparent fear or trepidation, fitness survives. A baby lightly bobs between water and air, suspended and unweighted by heavy social lead.
Why do we listen to all the positively negative nonsense we call news? There's nothing new about hatred, it has not evolved to date, not even in the last Google algorithmic update. Malware.
Why can't we all get along? We'll never agree. Reducing the problem down to its LCD, the lowly ones are singularly stoic. Grounded in futility, they stand unmoved by any urgency.
As the clock ticks by I remember pennies and seconds, those disappearing dirigibles that go up with inflation before remembering, like an elephant in the skyroom, we can all see it.
The solution as clear as the sun.
What time is it where you are? It's almost three, here. Somewhere else its eight right now.
There it is, one anomaly on which we both agree. Except when we are trying to save daylight, or leap around, rounding off the edges of time. Even or oddly if its early or late, we both somewhat have the same date, or season, for understandings reason.
We should start there, or here.
Synchronizing our watches and fine-tuning our ears, recalibrating our empathetic monitors and juxtapositioning our consciousness, realigning our common ground.
Discovering, recovering our sense of equilibrium we will succumb to worldly agreement.
It's about Time
Eddie, the whirled doesn't revolve around Us.
But over all earthly territories, we have already proven we can agree,
This is our Time
we created,
adrift
ego's lost in the Legas Sea.

Suffocating in stone

Our mass is felt most awkwardly oafish, obtrusive, repulsive, ugly, misshapen and completely wrong while in small spaces, be it a room, a car, a tent, a body.
That is how we are made to notice the significance of our every strand that so easily can become unravelled but shows how thick and tightly we are woven, braided, knotted and inextricably tied to others.
Our bed is how we like it, it should be-at least our side anyway, modest maybe, it is our humble hibernation space, a comfort zone, annuity fund.
We spend a fortune on thoughts tossed into the well of dreams while on the ledge of our beds between reality and fantasy, or nightmare. We frivolously spend our sleeping habits like worthless pennies that add up over time.
We properly adjust and situate and simulate our habitats.
A pretty bed, a California King bed, a four poster canopy bed may look inviting, but that doesn't guarantee comfort, losing sheep among the folds of the blinding mind.
It's cumbersome to be limited by the locale, character descriptions, steep and slanted arch-types with mis-matching labels, formalized by titles and rules.
Starting with an idea to edit one's reality, conclude with a change of your circumstance. You already have the tools you need.
One should heed Michelangelo and let the stone be freed from its misshapen form, it's mask of labels, loud stereotypes blur the fine lines and wrinkles.
You as the sculptor must start by manipulating, manually, your minds eye, adjusting your vision to take aim, instead of seeing life through rosy colored blame.


Image By Bain Collection (Library of Congress) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Hungry, Hungry Hypo

Hunger is rampant, even in fat America.

Empty calories do not nourish.  I can imagine licking the wallpaper glue like they had to do in Russia during the 90-day siege of Leningrad.

When I put sweetener in my coffee I often think it could easily be arsenic or sugar. A spoonful of sugar IS the poison going down. 

How many of us were given the moral ultimatum about cleaning our plates at the dinner table (clean-plate club or no dessert-dessert has two s's because you want a second scoop) and yet this seems like feeding torture to kids-why must we eat more than we are hungry for? 

Almost 100 years ago, around 1920 a woman named Kitty Marion was imprisoned in London at Halloway prison for giving a gentleman who had come to her troubled about his pregnant wife, and his too big of a household already- with his not enough to go around, and what to do dilemma-she gave him a pamphlet on this new concept called 'birth control'.  For providing her voice she lost her throat. The gentleman turned her into the authorities and while imprisoned she was forcibly fed 233 times, permanently causing severe throat damage (a record of some sort). Stubbornly consumed with her cause of not biting off more than one can chew, she was arrested 9 times in 10 years for her advocacy of birth control, a suffering suffragette. 

I was born when my mother was on birth control.

I'm thankful for the small percents, perseverance, chaos, chance and determination.

As a mother, I was not a good cook until the beginning of the Food Network. 

I became an excellent home cook and began writing food and dining critiques for a decently known news group (corp.) until gallstones rolled in, but really the problems started not long before that when my appendix exploded. A couple years and multiple hospital visits later it was no longer "safe" for me to eat out anywhere. I stopped writing the column. I still eat my words every day. 

Nowadays it's not just empty calories, following recipes and painting by the numbers.

I changed my diet, I thought I was always hungry, I was just not understanding what I was hungry for. A craving always finds its fulfillment.

Eating out is a luxuriant cultural tradition. Eating more than you need is a luxury every American takes when they eat out or eat any one of our three prescribed dietary recommended daily meals. 

Most American's no longer speak the same language as their own bodies, a communicable barrier, a language gap, the thigh gap? That's still a thing, the thigh trap for teenage girls. My daughter told me no young attractive females like the fitted t-shirt, mid-drifts and booty shorts and they were all designed by pedophilic men, she may be right. Aside from the washing label stating 'wash delicately', it should also say made with less than 1% of self-esteem. Why don't women get pockets that actually hold anything? Women are expected to hold everything because we are used to carrying weight, not just ours, or our children(s). 

Women have a stronger sense of smell and a higher pain threshold than men. If only I could smell fear like bees and dogs.

American's enjoy denying the joy of eating. Morality is the condiment of the 'new world'.  It's an acquired taste. Many countries I have learned spend hours eating a meal, and I admit I don't love food that much anymore to spend that much time 'eating' and mincing words about alphabet soups and umami. American's eat wrong, weigh the evidence. I'm not one to write about it however.

When I was little and my grandmother shared with me memories about the spread of 'consumption', I thought she meant over-eating, eating everything from paper to plastic, from primer to paint.

She meant the TB kind, which was first thought to be a disease confirming vampires prior to the Industrial Revolution, but really humans have been getting this disease since the beginning maybe we were born with it even latently. This is not just an old affliction or a thread of my grandma's yarn, in 2012 alone 8.6 million cases of consumption were confirmed around the globe. Consumption can also mean ingestion or to utilize economic goods and bads for the satisfaction, wants, desires, whims in the process of 'production' with the likely result of destruction, deterioration, and/or total transformation. An appetite for destruction. Some people allow television to consume their time. I let books consume me.

Feasting your eyes on art is a guilty pleasure that will add positively to your total weight, but don't worry, you can never over eat creativity. Like water, it goes right through you. 

America chose corn over art. Sugar over poetry. Fast food over brain food. Controlled manipulation. Famished Nation. Inherited ignorance in a state of bliss. 

Meanwhile, my stomach growls, I understand what it's telling me, I am sated with food for thought. 

Image By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A letter to my former self,

It sounds cliche because it is.
Sometimes these annoying little word packets of profundity hang around generation after generation for a reasonable reason.
Because these adages, often addressed to All of Us, contain some truth inside.
Hindsight and all,
If I only knew then...
The egg comes before the chicken,
it's Murphy's Law.
Which gets amended, riders added as the years pass, but in principle safeguards the same, the blame game, or a random act of unkindness, mindless appropriation by Murphy, who could have easily been John Galt.
There's that business about wisdom coming with age, like accrued interest, growing as quietly as grey hairs and as invisible as social security. There is no security, or forwarding address.
Nobody gets wise checks they can cash in the mail.
Sometimes lucky people acquire wisdom by gratuitous donation only, so it's deductible (since you are often in a not-for-profit status).
Donate your time, it's a secure investment
 in You.
Art is everywhere, never stop seeking it.
Circles will drive you nuts but you'll need the spiral-graph, starting and ending with infinite.
Synchronicity and serendipity, partners of a lifetime, will always know where to find you.
I wouldn't change a thread in those woven fibers of your being, the new me needs every single sinewy string, the patchwork of experience, worn soles, renewed souls...
Fear, love, anxiety, doubt, that feel like butterflies are the indicators of a chrysalis of change about to occur. Butterflies are better than worms.
It's okay to be scared.
You will always prefer being alone, so be a better friend to yourself.
You will get a higher education, you'll never stop nourishing your brain, many people that cannot understand you will claim you're insane, but they mean it nicely (I think).
You will read EVERY BOOK-
that you possibly can, and remember why you are here in the first place, like walking into a room to forget your purpose, you must retrace and try again.
You will have greater adventures in your non-fiction life.
You'll save these like squashed penny tokens from the boardwalk for a rainy day,
which always reminds you of home,
under any sky donning a grey coat.
Under starry skies before sunrise you'll telescopically find what you were looking for
is not up there, not out there, not outside of you.
You did not mis-step, there are no mis-takes, the picture is perfectly to your liking.
Errata will tempt you astray, but the road you're on doesn't go away, erosion control,
your foundations are solid. A sparkly glint, a yellow brick paved road will remind you of your own straightforward path.
Ever-ever land awaits.
Sometimes you will feel apprehension when you can't see around the corner, it's fine to fear
what lies ahead.
Problems with patience will persist, but practice perfects. You will exercise that muscle of Will, it will become the strongest part of you, you'll need it like a shield, you will persevere.
Survive and thrive. But I will be torturing you, as a practice, in the future,
I must in order to make it through the darkest parts. And worse, you will be my sacrifice, my token of forfeiture, giving is better than receiving, you get more. I will keep the pyre you started lit,
like a Virgil.
It's the journey that makes the warrior strong.
Stop tripping and keep going, one foot after another.
Don't worry so much about money, it isn't worth your time.
Letting go is the difference between flying and falling.
But you won't let go easily,
and realize all of what I have said is true for you, in a flash moment at nel mezzo del camin when you're about to die,
you realize you are right,
Write where you should be, as a shadow of self, a pale portrait, the nurse of nostalgia administers sweet injections of TLC,
for an impatient, fond but distant memory, of the old me,
curious about who I'll decide to be.



Image of wall of Senor Grubby's in Carlsbad, mural by Morley in conjunction with Synder Art Design.

It's not an Emergency, just a Suggestion

Sitting in the waiting room on Saturday morning at almost six, with my son whose is seventeen, and is writhing with stomach pains,
we waited-
as a patient would.
While we waited,
I noticed a Suggestion Box.
It sat in an unlit corner implying,
this private lascivious anonymous exhibition was a private, confidential, secure, receptacle,
after all it had a sturdy lock.
I had to conjecture that it was, in fact, it stood for something, a representation of something else.

(Whose job would it be at the ER to check this?
Never mind, I don't need any suggestions.)

A suggestion by definition must be made public.
It must be told, conjectured, proposed, I suppose.
And this suggestion box implied that there is an appropriate time and a place for suggestions.
It could just be a trap that nobody ever opens to see if it caught something.
Just dead flies in a booby trap, likely full of nasty feedback,
and static, no good-nik, anti-constructive, ranting, lamenting, venting. Warning; hot steam can scald, if your sensitive to the heat.
Despite the Suggestion Box being an ill-placed allusion of helpfulness, subversively hidden in plain sight, like the chairs, it was indeed there for those in need.
A suggestion qualifies as anything-
to represent another thing indirectly, figuratively and sometimes obscurely by evoking a thought, image or conception of it.
Then there's poetry. A poetic license, that is often suggestive, rather than assertive.
Robert Frost was icy to the double meaning, a poetic metaphoric bridge that reader is expected to cross without knowing how secure the span, or hopes to
fall through the cracks, in wide open gaps, down a slit just wide enough
for a suggestion to fit through.
My son didn't know the ER was not a first come first serve type of establishment. We shyly watched an old man with white hair, sweats, a flannel shirt, wearing crocs and small spectacles arrive in the ER with his wife trailing a car length behind- who had taken time to "put her face on" first, as my grandmother would have observed.
The old man seemed okay initially, his color and manner rather calm and muted. Then I noticed he seemed a little confused after continuously rubbing his brow.
He was shortly taken by a doctor to get an EKG, his heart was about to attack him.
My son realized the priority system.

“Mom,”he asked me with his unusually tousled chestnut hair,

deep sunken drab eyes

and his salty olive complexion turned to the green kind of olive,

his baby lips that look the same to me are the pimentos, he ignored the customary fond look in my eyes, “Can I say something that I guess sounds totally racist?”

“Um, sure.  Go ahead,” I responded off guard and was not sure if he was going to be offensive or funny, neither are really his strong suit.

“I would trust a black doctor the most.”

“Really?” I asked as a knee-jerk response, not really needing confirmation of his preference. Of course this was so. And perhaps racist, it still made me proud.

Things can change.

Our offspring are our Silent Spring, whose waters run crystal clear despite the source.

He's a sensitive human.
And then a gesture, or adjustment in his seat, the collar of his t-shirt drooped,
tiny tufts of hair curled from the collar,
and in that brief moment the way I saw him forever changed,
he's becoming a man.
He used the restroom, which is traumatic enough for him at a public facility, the trauma team needed on standby.
And when he sat back down, he beelllccched.
We exchanged a wordless glance. Then we went home tired.
I suggested he pay more attention to his diet.
Garbage in, garbage out, as my grandma used to say,
kind  of like that suggestion box,
brimming with gassy garbage.
We are all full of hot air-
but sometimes it can become your enemy instead of your reassurance,
the mothers mirror check for her sleeping baby's fog,
the relief that you are still alive and made grateful all anew, humbled by the gift of life,
or it could be both.
Either way suggestions can be difficult to digest.
A little lesson learned from the hospital room suggestion box.


Image credit: By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Putting puzzles together

After some thinking about intuition,
                                  (albeit a counter-intuitive process)
reading, researching, writing, putting things together,
like a jigsaw puzzle I realized intuition wasn't even the missing piece I was looking for.
It was only part of the puzzle.
I read this book called "Imagine", I imagine it is what I happened to be looking for, it was about stimulating the imagination and the professional side of creativity. All literature takes imagination. It was a creative moderately priced somewhat controversial book...
Then I started to put it together-
Those that can't do are supposed to teach what they can't do.
By imagining a place where creativity lives in the brain, like an address, so I can visit as often as I want,  feasting until sated on as much intuition and hospitality as I want, it is really the same as reading a book about being creative, or writing about a book that someone wrote about creating creativity.
Writing about writing.
The poet's obsession with the poem.
While I'm no teacher-this is good since I have nothing to tell-as you can tell-I can tell that
actions speak louder than any vocabulary at any volume.
Don't listen to me. Learn from my mistakes that I never knew I made-until I stumbled intuitively into some opportunity I had been planning all along. These weren't mis-takes they were mis-give(ings).
If we could get our creativity to work on cue maybe we'd find ourselves in another Renaissance period.
That's romantic isn't it, romanticism and chivalry revived. Not really, realistically.
Perhaps this period is just part of a sentence whose point has yet to be made.
If we once intuitively accepted that the world is not flat, are able to comprehend that there are rings around planets and perceive that intuition is a sixth sense that we have yet to fully develop, maybe we could finally map the ocean and our brains or even better, unearth the secret to earthquakes. Maybe we were told and forgot, or maybe we were the forgetful mistake, I don't remember.
The earthquakes in Nepal this year reminded us we are just ants crawling on Mother Nature's back. We are the Doozers from Fraggle Rock, despite what we build, make and erect, she can reject without regret, most often as soon as we forget about things like gravity and earthquakes.
We walk around with regret. One kilogram of regret has the same 10 neutron force of gravity. Such is the weight of the world on our backs.
When I was 12 I lived through a major natural disaster, so it is called. This natural phenomenon goes by many other more specific names, like cancer does. The one I was afflicted with was called
“earth-quake”.
I did not get hurt. No lives of my loved ones were lost-any more than they were before the earth began shaking.
They call it a disaster and not an occurrence because we have no control over it. Like all trauma, disaster takes charge, acts, reacts, and lasts like aftershocks that slowly lose magnitude over time only to be forgotten generations later.
It was violent, but I was more horrific than it.
My own children, now almost adults themselves, have not ever been confronted by these random acts of mortality. Not one natural disaster has come knocking at the door in their life and I'm afraid they've started to believe they are standing on terra firma.
That is a slippery slope of quicksand. Don't trust the ice-practice walking on hot coals first.
I was told a man named Jesus advises this too, but it could be a rumor.
I saw the promotion of a cinematic scare tactic, another apocalyptic action movie due to infiltrate the big screen called 'San Andreas' starring The Rock, how i-rock-nic.
The quake I lived through, the Bay Bridge fell through, the Rock should be warned, Alcatraz is not safe either.
Escape the fallen debris of a bad movie while you can! The aftermath will still be there.
Mother Nature doesn't care about putting the pieces back together.
She is still setting the table, putting the plates where she wants.
Someday there will be a big buffet. No invitations will be sent, no black tie event.
It will be first come, first serve.
Variety is the spice of life, not everyone has the same tastes. Better is a personal flavor.
What is universal? Is there anything we can all agree upon? What about perfect? What about symmetry, the Higgs Boson, doesn't it all always fit together, even meteorites being pulled under pressure seek the path of least resistance...and we have two eyes, but our feet don't match...
We are all abnormal choosing holding up under pressure, hoping for better.
Some days I wake up with a suspicion, an intuition that something special is about to happen, something wonderful is definitely waiting for me today, or likewise, something important, catalyst in my life, and then-nothing.

Herman Hesse wrote of the same feeling, “And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all;but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old..."

This is not a tragedy, or a disaster, it is a sentence that is not done, that will never meet its period so it is doomed to keep repeating them-
until I understood that finding the missing piece of the puzzle meant including myself, the puzzle will never become solved.
As the final and complete image becomes clear, when the puzzle is almost solved, when I am the last piece, realizing I have been creating something I don't want to finish, an earthquake will occur, spreading pieces of me everywhere, hoping someone will pick me up and start this puzzle all over again.
Until then I will keep seeking imagination while secretly waiting for intuition to show up.



Image By Jason7825 (Own work), 3-D Jigsaw puzzle [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I got lost in a poetry workshop

In a poetry workshop that I was not in, the instructor found a poem, in a rather serendipitous way.

It had been abandoned, like a muted dummy, behind glass windows with the occasional blaring lights and still nobody noticed it, nothing needed repeating so it hid without an echo in the Xerox, a sterile x-ray cloning machine, like perverted a fly on the wall, imagine all the things it has seen-purely x-ray-ted poemography.

The instructor said she tried diligently to find its composer. It didn't have an ID tag. It was an unregistered homeless poem uncounted. Like a stray cat, as independent as a poem or cat may be, it positioned itself to be heard, and cats don't meow just for themselves. And birds like their own songs.

The instructor did not use a paper poster with her phone number notched in strips fringed at the bottom of the page, she asked around, looking for its negligent owner.

Nobody called the unknown number, nobody claimed the paper.

Nobody at the workshop recognized the dummy because its features were so vague, it could be any of us, like the lucid moment(s) of writing a poem and the details arrive, it's right there, our likeness.

This abandoned poem could easily have hid in the trash instead, accompanied by overflowing evidence of wasted resources, spent but not gone.

The instructor credits old Anonymous, and recites it for the thousands in, but not at this poetry workshop.  All ears, just a washing machine of words and ideas whirled in from the wobbly weird world of poetry, have you seen some of those people? I don't look, but I'm all ears.

And amid the chaos and anonymity this voice, its thoughts, noticing, go on and on and on, and when you are not listening you are hearing, you are there, seeing it, you are in it. It was not her voice, her reading, it was the weight of the words on the page.

It may have not been special, but it was a wonderful wonder how it all worked. Simply, eloquently and delicately weaving into ones reality, a choice, of another voice, that sees the same thing.

Causeless, waiting to be found, it's speech not wanting to interrupt, polite and ready to multiply, resonate, refract, project, distribute, share its dislocated effect at any time. It stopped me. Grabbed, arrested and invested in me so humbly.

Which made me realize, or recognize really, that the most powerful poetry, the best poetry, has oft been abandoned, rejected, neglected-abused by is creator-who must let it go- literally must let it go-in every way…

Because there is no poet, there is only poetry-waiting to be heard. Yes, by other poets in a poetry workshop that were never even there, but who also cherished every poetic word, louder than it could have ever hoped to have been heard, as an anonymous dummy quietly hiding in the copy machine.

Image by William Blake [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, A Little Girl Lost Plate 44.

What a book nook took

A book will help.
It usually does. I don't even need to read it.
Just buying some will help. It's not just about the smell. If inhalants smelled like books,
I could understand the addiction.
I'm not talking about shopping therapy, too many Americans have tried that DIY.
I have a public secret spot, really, at the local library.
These are lonely books. Some are from dead people,
I know.
I can't smell it, but I can read between the lines. It is rather poetic actually, some great writers jammed next to local authors that slide in their own books. Some of those books suck. Some lie-there. And will.
But I have found diamonds-no, I don't like diamonds-I have found flowing streams of crystal consciousness, that can be icy, crisp, like pins and needles-stimulating,
invigorating. I have read classics like stepping into
a working time capsule, tactile, mouthwatering, delectable,
delicious. I can't help that. Saying yum yum about a great book.
Mothers do this to their babies too and it's not meant to be
cannibalistic.
My cat does this to me.

I take what cash I have on me when I go to the secret spot.
People don't carry much cash these days, someone should tell panhandlers this.
Is there a secret union? I don't like conspiracies, they're like cults. There is a secret language for panhandlers, or I mean hobos. Did you know that? It's in symbols to mark things.
Primitive.
Anyway, I usually have less than $5 and maybe some change.
Do you carry pocket change, or is it in the car?
For $3.50 I have come home with a half dozen exotic strangers.
Some are friends of mine already. Some I may be interested in, like a date.
No harm. All goes into the Trust Box. The money, that is.
Payphones are jealous of Trust Boxes.

I've already broken all my rules.
I'm deep in the abyss of my silent treatment.
Sulking, kind of.
Sometimes I annoy the crap out of myself.
This abyss has alternating warm and cold currents,
kind of like that stream of consciousness I am hoping to dive into.
I think you are a book person too.
People write books as a form of therapy.
Re-living the past. Freezing it. Like a deer in headlights.
Do you look at old pictures of yourself? (I've looked like a deer) Are you embarrassed or envious?
I'm the first one.
Public pain=Best seller.
I know some warm flowing blood is in every published book.

Self-help is a relatively new genre, arriving just before Reality TV and just after the music left MTV.
Are they used like recipe books? For foodies of drama.
We are all foodies by necessity, searching for the perfectly ripe fruitful endeavor.
We need nourishment, I need brain nourishment.
No two dishes followed to the exact specifications of a recipe ever turn out the same.
Fast food is not made, it is a mold.
There are books like fast food too.
Romances.
All books are self-help really. It's up to you to help yourself.
Not steal books, but listen, swallow, savour, jump in. Get some old good traditional couch therapy.
And the cat.
But as I check my wallet, I realize I'm broke.
Not even change.
I will need to ask for help.



Image of painting by Louis Comfort Tiffany [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Optimism Injections

It was recently reported in the US that most chicken farmers will stop injecting their chickens,
our food supply,
with hormones, isn't that nice?
I thought so too,
before I corrected myself with some sanity-how long have they been doing this?
How much hormones and from where and whose or from what and why?
I remember hearing something about milk a few years ago,
which didn't concern me too much at the time being allergic to milk myself as a child
I never liked the liquid chalk,
but it was said that the hormones they inject into the cows was trickling down into our milk supply-another brilliant discovery! Not mad cow disease they said but have you ever come across a Bessie that had raging hormones? Sounds like a mad cow to me.
Furthermore,
that this additive process was resulting in girls crossing the threshold of puberty earlier, great.
My daughter is, or was, a milk monger as a baby and at 14 she is the only one of her friends not at the period party yet, or rather hasn't joined the menstrual martyr's club. So much for that false alarm.
Still, there is cause for concern when the general public,
who has become freely and wildly organically unlinked from their food chain
and can only follow the breadcrumbs to the local whole foods grocery store,
will eat anything in a convenient pretty packaging and believe,
with the ultimate confidence in our FDA,
knowing with ultimate trust in our government safety regulators that all ingredients are included,
as stated on the newly required label.
It's not lying if you neglect to mention, right? Errors and omissions are pardonable.
Then there are these super-bugs going around which are not like killer bees, or like bugs with capes, Super-Bug-that is the viral epidemic word choice for unknown germs resistant to our own human 'super powers' and must be demolished!
Except we actually created them.
And continue to grow them;
every time a child is given antibiotics when it's not necessary,
every doctor that is visited for a cough or headache,
every Prilosec and Viagra commercial-
we give birth to a new bug. Congratulations!
Let us not forget that the boy who cried wolf was a great storyteller who also liked attention more than the truth, he ended up dead and alone, if that was the moral of the story, why do we have so many medicines?
Are we not the fittest of the species anymore?
Athletes get cortisone shots if they have had injuries, it takes the pain away, now they also use cock's comb too, which is all natural right? Birdbrain.
My step-dad used to offer his assistance when I got hurt to ease my pain,
informing me that he'd make that pain go away-
implying by hurting something else worse, he could eradicate it and multiply it, not knowing where it all started so we just keep hurting each other,
to ease the pain.
We should reconsider this approach as not so primitive, perhaps
you need your Ambien because you can't sleep, it's too loud outside-
but you don't live in a war zone-wake-up!
Who cares if anyone has frown lines anymore, don't worry, don't be happy, who cares.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the flesh and bone type of humans
to their mannequin, plastic counterparts,
after a dip in the fountain of youth there's a certain tight shine, oh yes, it's Botox,
forget checking the Rolex, time just ran backward, past the liver spots over those thin crepe paper gloves.
Aging isn't the enemy,
pain isn't the enemy,
getting sick isn't a terrorist assault,
a rainy day is not an excuse for suicide,
getting lost should not be scary,
taking a walk on the wild side should be required exercise,
and if we could all take Optimism shots,
or Immunize for Hypochondria
and prescribe pink glasses for Myopia
we will likely live a lot longer-or see past our own nose
then again,
death doesn't seem like the worst outcome after all...
if you can't tell, I already had my injection.




Image by By Creator:Mary Young Hunter, c. 1901 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.