Never leave your heart alone

just had a "oh, I guess we're not friends anymore" new years eve party.
alex played piano with his new fiery red beard, looking so much like his dad.
Ian sleepwalked around the living room sporting short hair and not a fork in sight--just in case, he said.
and we laughed, like old times.
amanda recounted her spanish love affair and we counted down the minutes until we could
"drink that damn champagne."

we're still in it now--this strange limbo land of college-age kids home for the holidays. three boys who turned out to be better friends than most of those I've considered lifelong.

so long old life, so long.

To Heidi

Yesterday was the day you were born
so I wore your favorite color
and walked by the sea--
Imagined we were in South Africa,
imagined you were only hiding.
I talked of butterflies,
that simple, white-winged inspiration
I followed home
to your wedding and then
your funeral.
In the church
I talked of your love
and begged those flowers
in those fragile, porcelain vases
to disappear.
One by one we stood
and said:
She was our butterfly
so full of light.
We sat on our knees
and bartered off every part of ourselves
for your breath, your laugh.
Cancer, they said.
And then, Wait.
To a woman with cancer
they said, WAIT.
I'd run to your arms
when I heard your voice in our hallway.
"Oh, Swee-tie" you'd say.
or something like it,
none of us could ever get it quite right.
You were 43 and fiercely, fearlessly happy
and when you walked into the room,
so were we.

Written 11/12/07

Sing Your Stories Out Loud November 6, 2008

Stars grow up and out of the earth
suppressed by cement,
only to fall back again.
Turned to mush under my feet with the force of Demeter's grief.
And despite this--
despite those things that threaten daily
to knock our hearts sideways and leave us
rooted and spinning out, out, out on the wet dark ground--
we are living.
we are Living.
It rains, and it rains, and it rains
and the air opens up like a hand
and we pull on the sound on the sound on the sound
til it comes bursting out:
more life, we say. more life.
We find someone to hug,
to hold to,
to look deep in the eye
towards hope.
and a voice that is not lost,
that will not be silenced,
that will not stand for a ban on love.
That will live in impossible Joy.

"Happy Biggest Day of Change for our Country Ever!"

Obama Obama Obama

Have class today, talked to mom, wrote in Journal. Going to Eden's to watch her cable as we don't have it.

How is anyone going to be able to focus at Cornish College of the Arts today?

Amanda, I love you, I hope you got your ballot in time.

Obama, Obama, Obama

Because there should be a hole in the world...

9/30/08
you write like....
like what?
like everything I've ever wanted to be true,
except there's nothing beautiful
about this anger I've got,
nothing about the emptiness in my arms
and eyes
and heart right now
that feels powerful
nothing hopeful about any of it
that will say anything about your words
that you probably don't already know
nothing clever or clear--
only a small step away from despair.
A counterbalance away from connection

11/4/08
and now...
now is a moment
I feared would never come for this country,
a night of impossible joy,
holding so tightly
to each other,
as if the whole world existed in that moment
with a woman I hardly know,
whose eyes said everything.
and we fling ourselves back into that crowd
of hope and tears
and relief of fear from the last eight years.

11/6/08
I am rooted to this chair,
I am holding my heart and my hands
and my eyes open
And in these moments,
I am irrevocably changed
by your bravery.
By your strength.

Hope is a thing with feathers

The struggle to survive becomes the struggle to hope,
against all odds,
hope for the world to turn on the head of a man
and revitalize itself.
oh but it is so much easier to drink the poison
and be done with it,
to divide ourselves molecule by molecule into what we cannot do
and numbly grab for the lesser evil,
it is so much easier and leads to death with not a kiss.

No one can find the rewind button, girl, so just cradle your head in your hands

her neck opens
on a hinge
and a blue butterfly
breaks free from its prison
of skin and muscle,
sinew, and bone
Her possibility flees towards the outside world
to lead us all
to that secret place called wanting.
A guiltless wanting
to know all of life,
to swallow it up
and let it hold me
open inside,
so the rest of me will breathe.

I dreamed of Africa
and woke up crying,
my ears held fast
by unspeakable tragedy
and privilege
both unearned, un-asked for.
Orleanna Wharton
walks forward
out of the jungle
and the world shifts.
One more scar for survival,
one more footprint,
one more "truth"...................................................continued.

so I'm back.
and have seen X-Files: I want to Believe for the second time. wouldn't mind seeing it again, or seeing some more Mulder/Scully love. Gillian Anderson makes me proud to be an actor, makes me want to go out there and put my heart out on the floor just because of how beautiful and human she is. the woman breaks my heart.

I hope they make more.

I also hope that one day I can say to someone--"it's why I fell in love with you" and mean it the way Scully means it. chin quiver and all. I hope I say it to someone who's my best friend, who I'd trade lives with in a heartbeat, and who wants what I want. I hope I have what they have, well, except for the aliens and government conspiracies. They have never been more wonderful together than they are in this movie. let the love rain down. to Gillian and David and Mulder and Scully--all wonderful, lovely, heart-wrenching human beings.

Michelle

She laughed at me as I said it,
my dramatics were ridiculous, my ferocity at something
fictional deserved a chuckle,
but what must it have been like for her?
"Right before a person dies they show you who they really are."
In the end his brilliance opened the bottle
and left him naked on the floor.
But brilliance will not choke and sputter as you strangle it to death,
it will not weep for you,
it will not comfort you.
I pretend to understand human suffering
acoss every face
to convince myself
of what I am not capable of.
But I'm only one hard shove away
from Harvey Dent--
Scarred and Broken
and talking to myself on a street corner
with a bullet I'm saving for Russiann Roulette
resting safely in my dirty cotton pocket.

seventeen days!!!!!!!

Not Pretty or Polite

a broken egg spills down my girl uterus
making its way into the bath
amongst gold flecks,
tension, and salt.
and I think, why not this?
why not a sun-burned thigh stopped
halfway at the knee
like a cup of brown sugar
tamped down and ready for baking?
East of Eden lies on the white tile floor
--poetry amid dirt and water--
reminding me of a man
who seemed to ward off all things excess and untrue
like a firewalker untouched by the flame.
life is poetry,
he seemed to say with every simple phrase.
He scorched the truth out of the wilderness
with grace.

under a banyon tree airbending

There is a difference between letting life take you where it will and laying down in the hot summer sun so it can ravage you. there is a difference between lying helplessly on the ground and standing solidly on your own two 18 year old female, writer actor feet. The commas do not sit in their own places anymore-a hummingbird flies swiftly out my window among lavender and the last of the bees. I amthinking, thinking, thinking, let ting it all simmer in my mind--like a metaphor at 2 am. so here is a poem to Ani. I picked up my brother's guitar and strummed hoping to hear her voice in the hum, hoping to reconcile her eyes with her words. the guitar like her heart--the glue that holds her small frame together. It isn't a good poem and it isn't what I meant, but it's something. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better. resides in my shoe. here's to all those who've failed, all those who've tried. all those who stand in the summer sun and make choices about their lives. what shalll I do today? sit at home aimlessly watch tv until its time to go to work...so no no non 0nononononononononononnonononononononononooononononononononononnonononn here's to saving the world one inarticulate, heartfelt word at a time. If I cut a hole in the air with a jacknife would I see it's soul there, or would there be a black hole there?

is it fiction?

tonight I didn't have to sit on the porch with a gun in my lap half-frazzled to death to smell the smoke. I didn't have to see the moon glow red or feel ashes like fairy bones in what's left of my hair to know a fire was near. We didn't have grand mariner, only creme de cocoa, rum, and vodka. I didn't have to plant a garden with seeds left as gift from my dead father to know we are outgrowing ourselves. The car hasn't run out of gas yet and we didn't drive those last few miles on fumes, only denial and a desperate hope. I see the footprints of the men who raped my country and the washing machine has broken through the roof. A girl named Nancy takes off her clothes in front of her children to leach the sadness of her life into the weed-drenched pool and comes up sobbing.

A CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN

eating honey nut cheerios with rice milk and drinking earl grey. I couldn't bring myself to use milk this morning. somewhat pointless since I do love ice cream, but what are you going to do?

It's 2008, I am 18, and we are going to have a new president soon. We are poised on the brink of something, and I hope it's change, and if it's Obama I hope with all my heart he's really as committed and sincere as he claims to be.

tonight I will run and tomorrow I will start my own campaign of change--start my day with the paper, some vonnegut, and a little yoga. then off to work.

my 14 year old brother sewed his backpack together this morning, I've never sewn anything-time to learn.

possible staged reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

cheers to a new day.

No more Home Depot--fair trade store in good old slowly-turning-soulless Healdsburg.
and a tattoo. am now permanently altered.
things seem to be moving along, new job, a routine to establish. time to start working on those headstands and cartwheels. I must learn to defy gravity before the summer is out.

The Prize Winner of Defiance

why is it I am always more motivated to do things for other people? don't answer it, I don't want to know. sat in aroma's for two hours and finally said what I've been feeling for a while now, with ease actually, possibly with grace--I don't know who I am when I'm alone. That is, when I'm not adapting to other people, not waiting for something great to happen so I can start to live my life. We made a pact, this friend and I, fight the summer depression by taking charge of our own damn lives, making choices for ourselves. I'm failing miserably. brilliant actually, when you consider I'm going to school to learn to make choices. and not even just choices, DYNAMIC choices. I suppose I am just ranting now, doing exactly what I've always done. but perhaps I am allowed? after all, I'm making the choice to rant. I am sitting at the keyboard with the knowledge that tomorrow I will be attending Home Depot Orientation (sports tape intact), and still I am choosing to rant. It seems that I am always wanting to be somewhere other than where I am, hence the desire to play make believe for a living? like Genevieve I am waiting. waiting, waiting, waiting. and she was right when she said it's lonely. the kick is, I do it to myself. and then I think of Richard Curtis--such a wonderful teacher, an exceptional teacher--there is no free will, he said. I've heard it before, I'm sure we all have. but this time he explained it, and I listened. There is no free will because we are all products of our environment and our genetic code, and so we are going to respond to something predictably based on those things. It's not that I'm choosing, it's that I'm "programmed" to choose a certain way. It's not the way I live my life, but it's interesting to think about. this is a full blown rant and there is a full blown scream going on in me. about what, about the absence of things. just the sheer empty absence of things. this doesn't have an end, or middle, and I don't know where it will go, hopefully I'll come out guns blazing and the summer depression will cower at my feet. hopefully I will find more than just a string of sentences. fight on.

in absence of being clever

The Jane Austen Book Club--a movie Hollywood has systematically ruined by tying everything up with a nice happy bow, all the loose ends are cut or tied off--a movie where amy Brenneman is beautiful because her name is Amy, because humanity and vulnerability crack her open like a raw egg, because she created a show in homage to her mother, and willingly showed softness and messiness, anything that could so easily slip through our fingers. So I am sitting here wishing I had the book about the book club in which to refer, wishing there was another ending to add to this beautifully bare portrait of women and life and relationships. I am dreaming about a boy I will never have because he no longer exists, he may never have existed. He's like a stone I rub for good luck, so worn I can no longer tell what drew me to it in the first place, I only know my fingertips miss its touch--like a habit, a figment of my imagination. so perhaps I will meet a girl, perhaps I will find a swedish looking coat-sweater to wrap myself in at night, perhaps I will grow out my hair and trail it down a castle wall like rapunzel. perhaps I will sleep well and dream of new york city in the snow, and a white down comforter to chase away the mean reds like Tiffany's and Audrey on a hot summer day the morning after a gorgeous party. perhpas, perhaps, perhaps.

This is an attempt to figure who I am, who it is that I am becoming. It is an attempt to write more, to think less, and to simply exist and appreciate my life and myself.