building blocks

Halt, Past.

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

Preserved in the past,

the present will pass and become passed,

passing through portals,

a passage pursued by mortals,

trying to immortalize the atrocities committed as merely cordial.

Dialing in the correct order,

measuring the mortar,

aligning boundaries and building up borders.

No strong enough a soldier

can break through what has been soldered and smoldered

under the burning embers of coal.

The soul

tries to rise from the ashes of shame,

from the shadows cast in blame,

a game of then and now with no sight of the future,

aside from the sutures.

In spite of the putrid

oozing of endless boozing in a punch drunk love.

Above

it all, yet looking down,

a broken smile

known as a frown

is the gown plastered on the face of disgrace.

Placed firm in a foundation of cracked cementing statues,

lamenting in laminated hope brochures,

which lock in the last known attempt to procure

a treasured polished piece.

It’s niche,

and not quite as ripe as a peach.

Peel off the veneer,

all unleashed,

the superglued splinters fall at the feet.

It had always been incomplete

but entered into the show to compete.

Completely tarnished,

streaks of varnish

drip stains on the remains

of what the future could not halter,

the alter.

Featured

Why getting dumped on Woman’s Day (weekend), during Women’s Month, honors the Celebration of Women, Woman’s Day, Woman’s Month, Woman’s Life.

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

This may seem ironic at first. Getting dumped honors women you say, how’s that? I know, it may be hard to see that as true at first, but the playbill that we have all been watching, was not what I auditioned to be a part of. I think it is safe to say, that a lot of leading women “roles” are actually a monologue of the deflated main character’s hopes and dreams. So what better way to step back into the limelight the woman was destined to play, than by being let go by a director who lost the lines to the script?

Break a leg!!

Oh ouch, I mean that figuratively, because we may need that balance as I explain just how empowering it could be to get ditched by the garbage delivery service. It’s like scoring a vintage Tiffany’s lamp in someone’s “FREE” bin on the curb, that you just got kicked to. Perhaps it can be visualized as a rare recording that just got remastered and goes platinum in a week after being dropped by a “bigtime label.” Actually, if you’re thrifty, it is as invaluable as the Juicy or Coach bag tucked away in the back of a dirty shoe shelf at a Goodwill.

Ok, ok, but why is this such a good deal?

Frankly, because I am, as you are, worth more than the mass produced cheap trash that was being fed into my soul.

The dish that I kept ordering and tasting was delicious though. Like downright made my mouth water. Every single time I sat down back at the table and I waited for my yummies, such a tasty and delectable appetizer. I was hungry though. The chef and I talked and clearly he was still a line prep. I love a man who can cook. So he kept feeding me the little delicious morsels that were filling me up, with an order on the line for the main course. My hopeful chef though, was still picking out other ingredients. He was ordering and eating from other menus as well as cooking really well for personal company. It was as if this prep cook was bringing back some of those leftovers and trying to serve them as fresh and uniquely supplied from his growing garden. I got food poisoning. Every time I bit into the prepared meal, I was dished out more watered down, reused and polished colanders caked of uncooked yolks.

The yolk was on me….

Let me tell you folks, the yolk is runny. Almost as runny-y as I am…..was….back into the shallow end of a pool that I thought kept getting deeper. Deep enough that I seemingly kept drowning in the buoyancy. I like to swim. But here’s the thing. Sometimes my water is really really dark, stagnant and pungent. I think I must be my own pool boy who just came fresh out of the gym, but has no flex. Mostly though, often I am a deep sea scuba diver that cannot navigate the way through a pond of my own wastewater. It is this environment that any sea-goer of my ship must fare at any time the storms roll in. But they are ripples from the rains of tears that were collected from the scorches of the thunderbolts at sea, where my nets have always been cast, since the time I was a Moses in the reeds. A collection of a liquid story.

An open book kind of story.

A story where it can get really difficult to trudge through those rambling rants of agony and loss. A long narrative where the writer has emphasized every letter to its fullest enunciation, giving exclamations to the most grueling grief. I narrated chapter after chapter of disbelief and debilitation followed by triumphs, joys, and reconciliations. But when the readings started reflecting and recording the rips the pages have held since the beginning of the press, the reader suddenly forgot how to read, shut the book. When opened back up to the joy of expression, after spurts of censorship, its an easy read with short stories of love, growth, and excitement. Yet when the next chapter, needs, to have its own title, needs to be enveloped into, co – authored and on the same page about where the rips are from and why they keep ripping, it suddenly becomes a comic book to the reader. Audible laughter became the veto to my voice and the red pen to my memoir.

MY memoir, MY Memories….

Many memories I have that I will hope to wash off the body like a temporary tattoo, where once the image was bright and crisp but the lasting result was a dull residue. Unlike the marring fingerprints from handling a collectible art piece to handily, some of the markings, the scar on my back, will not wash away, scrub away. Thankful I am now aware that I can have something incredibly beautiful braided onto my skin and seek healing in the process. As an artist, what is any better a way to express a scarred and tossed away clay lump of “too much mess,” than to become my own flowing and evolving masterpiece of self allowance and mastery?

A mastery of mind release.

See? It is now to become a release of all that was bound up in reflexes heightened to rubber band reactions. Wound up as tight as it could wind and triggered at its last of elasticity, snapping out of sight, and all that is left is the waves of energy left behind. The reverberations generated have shaken the casing off and created an emergence of what is to come. A flooding of all that has been dammed, from all the damns that were uttered, has come rushing through, ready to cleanse the basin. Gleaming and polished porcelain now, a receptacle of rejoicing once the voice was free to flow.

Flowing freely …

Freestyle forming now. It becomes time to see the freedom in becoming free. Not inundated with the pressures of not being able to withstand the opposition to expression. See now, the hardening chiseled away and reveals the treasure of those pressures. A diamond. Lighting the pathway which has been cleared to lay the new foundation of my Kingdom with the precious gems of the noble build. It becomes time to apply my own masonry of paving the way to a star studded encampment that will encompass all that is glistening in the glory of growth, and no longer held from progress. A lamp unto my pattering feet…

As I finally walk away…

Walk away from the table of poison where I no longer have to wonder who’s garden you pillaged to plate my palette… As I float away from falsity of finding depth in your shallows and shark infested wade pool that just waits for me to emotionally bleed and feast on my fears… As I saunter along into the sunshine and seek out only the growing seedlings found along in salutations of honesty and full hopes… I am upcycled from the bin of bruises you boxed me in and will encase the world in an array of raw and real reverence. I have become the priceless point of existence where all that reflects back to me is an understanding of what I know I am worth. And as far as being discarded in the dump, I realize that you are what you eat. I ate a lot of garbage, I became a lot of garbage. I was fined for wanting to reduce, reuse, and recycle from trash to treasure. So, while the garbage man is still making trips back and forth to the dump, I, a rare and valuable creation of star stuff and bright lights am able to find the value of the depths and rise above the heaps, where there are no more shadows dimming the hope and love I have to shine.

Shine on, me, you, crazy diamonds.

So … confused?

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what it is with this feeling I don’t want to let go

but I know I’m no longer healing

I can see the happiness congealing

into little pools. …

when I pass by

i see the reflection of only a fool

who keeps trying to jump over the puddle forgetting it’s a river

forcing myself to Drown,

pressing down

into a sliver of hope

waiting for it to Hold my body

and help me Float

Flow freely, I don’t wanna keep repeating these same mistakes

waiting and hoping for love to grow,

but it won’t,

how could it when I raise the stakes every day.

This is loves game to play,

bounce the heart back-and-forth between what is real

and what is my reality,

what is real to me?

I only shorten that time by the time I spend questioning

the time I spend assuring

that deception is luring and

obscuring the clarity,

the hilarity is the severity

of how disparity takes a hold of me

and I see that I can see

but I’m blind to the outcome,

trying to outrun

the inevitability that this journey is done, drug me down turned me into someone that is no longer some one’s

present and certainly not future…

it’s fear is pure.

Born out of hell for the last two years. And now I can see

how I am responsible for these

about to be tears.. .

All the hypocrisy

coming from my broken mirror.

No wonder it all looks mispieced

and no wonder my perception

is not perceived the way that I can, conceptually

this is a malfunctioning plan

if I expect to somehow reflect

these jagged edges

and expect you to understand

and make them smooth

and cut clean like hedges..

still broken and rebuilt

but preferred to stack my brokenness tidy and esthetically,

brick by brick of emotion

as to predict the pattern accordingly, unfortunately

or a misfortune for me

or perhaps it is all jumbled beautifully, but when you look you see

shattered and shredded stories

staring back at you

from your imagery of truth,

and hear from your preferred tuning

in or tuning out of the details

expressed through,

communicating empathy.

and the reply is emptily

offering empty hearts,

easily breaking apart ,

what little is left of loves art

Unexplainable

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

in the land of coincidence this was the most generous description of happenstance. it wasn’t like it was just a casual encounter or a quick side eyed glance. it came across as poignant decision making lacking any evidence of chance.

a change was noticed and the energy fell weak. the exchange of interest softened below the peak. it became directed elsewhere and the loss was not meek. somehow fainting in persistence week by week.

an energy brewing and thickening each day creating suffocation. a knowledge among the stars shining down inappropriate provocation. and an air about it ruminating vanity, causing a personal indignation.

Tangible in the smell of something not quite right in the senses. Any attempt of clarification builds up an unnecessary display of defenses, only confirming the initial questioning of advances.

It’s a cosmic awareness of conversations employed. Communications offering disdain to the committed love joy. This Layering of perspective creating new versions of allowing a secretive ploy.

Encouragement of union and unity is on a wavering foundation. Opportunity presented daily for egoist masturbation gives a slide of hand to genuine and pure intention. castrating genuine and symbiotic connection and affection.

Gripping onto a slippery slope of ideas and projecting. Never ending the questioning with a confirmation or upfront viewing. Only hiding. Only silently replying. Only giving all into something that is mystifying.

Tiny Streams

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

The disappointment that continues to ensue is beginning to be irreparable. The damage is settling in and pulling up a chair, asking what’s for dinner, making a bed. It knows that it is on a hot trail to its own success. Of course, in the process, completely obliterating any semblance in that aspect, of that particular sanity . The crushing weight of what was supposed to be and what should have been has begun to really stomp all over my dreams. It has found a path through what was supposed to be happiness and has temporarily hijacked the entrance and exit. Blocking hope.

This barricade started out with just little wash outs in the road. Tiny little streams of disarray just trickling over the way, causing brief pauses and little moments of panic. The attempt to keep the direction open and secure was loosely bound up by grains of sand, lightly kicked off the side to plug up that little stream just enough so that it didn’t appear to cross back into our mission. So of course, the mission continued. We pass on by that little trickle of doubt and push on through.

With a long enough journey, especially one that makes you climb and climb, it will inevitably be filled with these little streams along the way. It is expected, it is exciting to overcome those little obstacles, strengthening the climber, building a bit firmer center of existence.

After time though, getting further along, kicking pebbles and sand to fill the gaps…just hop over it. There isnt enough time in the journey to completely build all the boundaries needed to walk this way. It just becomes an unwanted, yet expected, so familiar…. and a nuisance to progress, forward progress. Jumping over these ditches on the rise to the top has now become the trail guide’s recommendation for recovery and quickest route to comfortability.

Pressure begins its due process. Pushing through all the little cracks of the poorly built barriers, the trickling evidence of entropy plots its course. The shift in energy is in the air, it is felt by the rumble of the core. The path is no longer a terrain of sure footing and sacredness. The wash out rolls effortlessly over and through the depths of the ditches, drowning all attempts and efforts of past crusades.

The landscaping of life is now flooded by the inability to work efficiently and in unison with the instructions. An entirety of land washed away, where the roots and the water are one, and there is no ground to ground to. The failing, the endless flailing, the fragments and fear, whirl around with the tide that is stirred by the forgetting to dam the doubts. Damn the doubts.

Floating.

Lifelessly floating with the waves of woe.

In the distance, on the horizon of hope where one day I will be able to walk a path again. Hike to the harmonious collision of dreams and reality. Hike to the hellacious chasms of reality and dreams. Along the way while smelling the fresh new blossoms of chance not forgetting to bring the gear needed to build the dam before the journey.

Compartments

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

And then there are those times in which you hate everyone who has a baby who survives labor and delivery. It’s this fraction of space and time that occupies or rather seem to invade your lifespan in a blink of existence. Of course you want everyone to survive or transition with ease and as whimsically as possible.

Let’s face it though, it makes me cringe.

Every. Single. Time.

Except for when my best friend had her baby. I anxiously awaited news that her c section went fabulously and that little man was well. Then as soon as I knew all was well, I got remarkably resentful, and not of her (not of baby either). Now it meant that I would forever look at this precious realm of innocence and shroud it with the constant reminders of what we were going to relive again. Our eldest and our youngest… all the firsts our “lasts” were going to share close together… now replaced by all the firsts and all the nevers.

Somehow I have to really compartmentalize all the compartmentalized compartments into even smaller sub compartments to stay sane and claimant on our relationship.

She gracefully understands this process.

This is a gripping effort on ripping away the pain hold  that grief grabs on to, desperately.

It is incredibly frustrating to be angry with someone for just being alive. It’s not really even them though. It is the seemingly blatant disregard for my soul that the “creator” would constantly allow these situations to unfurl at my wounded base. Which, by the way, is at such a weakened state that the slightest breeze, even intended to be comforting, is trembling earth all around. It is natures gamble in regard to whether or not the structure will remain standing. The structure itself has no plan, it just waits.

There is rarely a day that goes by that doesn’t hold a note of laughter sounding off behind my every attempt to breathe quiet to my brain. In every essence of “just be” there is the subtle waft that lingers too, with an “on your guard.” In the constant effort exerting from my everything to enjoy anything, there are equally what seems like exorbitant amounts of endless prodding of my personal patience practice.

And along comes another compartment.

The section where I have to put the realization that there will always be more babies. Also, I am able to love and cherish my best friends baby in a way that i may not have before… Perhaps he will need me in the future and the little box of subconscious resentment (which, i don’t actually resent this baby or his mama – in any way, truly) that has been built into my normal will be quashed and I can let babies be born with a warm heart… but until then, I separate my pain from my love, for his little innocence is the only current hope I have to reclaim love for the cycle of life. And soon, I will no longer be able to provide this type of life cycle, which, I’m building a compartment for as well.

I didn’t know it then, but I do now…  Archaea’s death was not just hers, nor “mine,” but all the little intricacies and interweavings of what life is made from. The vein of life and death are the same and it all flows together. Every movement is intertwined with realities and possibilities and limits, and like energy, we are exchanging each others movements all the time. Thus creating another opportunity to present more pain, confusion, distortion, for every release, focus and clarity.

Every baby’s birth is my baby’s death and the death of me, our lives, reality….

I wait.

I build compartments.

I long to build one to stand on and let birth, babies, and unicorns be my open platform of personal power!

broken building blocks

/ the proverbial phoenix / Leave a comment

I realize that I should be able to control myself in regard to attitude, behavior, emotions, etc., but sometimes I just can’t.
Today is one of those days. This was supposed to be a good day regardless of what I knew prior to going to sleep.

Without fail though brick walls began building their boundaries and I am the one that lives within these borders.
I can’t tell who the orders are coming from only that there is an ominous tone to all things. The who or the what that governs our decisions and provides little markers of measurement tallying up to what becomes us is askew and misinformed. At least, mine is.

However, I don’t just leave it at that. I have to dig in and sift around to expose the roots. Indeed, the goal must be to trace the lineage of pain that the limbs shoot foliage of inconsistencies from.
That exposure though, that uncovering, sends a chill through the vines, our deepest parts are vulnerable. Also, viewable. I try to put each particle in its personal Petri dish for further observation.

Pain is putrid and it multiplies. It is seen perusing around and around each element of action and pushing the edges closer and tighter together. The blur of its rapid attempt to attach fragments of fret to every single string of our hearts is infuriating. Putting this parasite into a timeline and dissecting its power under pressure eludes to what parameters we (I) am working with, or against, for that matter.
It provides perspective. It also opens up the earth and shakes the sediment that surrounds our structures of existence.

There is a warning. It comes across each division and sub shoot of our growing system. It disguises itself as a tool to tend to the digging up of decay. With each thrusting of the spade it carves seemingly unnoticeable nicks in the casings of our membranous earth holdings. This creates constant infliction of trace infections every time these roots of reckoning try to reach further into a safe hold, its foundation.

As I am trying to germinate myself into a new garden there is one constant in this growing zone……
I am already an established organism and my building blocks are working overtime with the intention of new development. With every ground I think I am breaking new, I am reminded that only extensions of me can attempt to gain structure and that each reach further stretches those nicks into marks that end up becoming quite visible and palpable on the surface. Every outside element rains a penetrating reminder of pain and it courses through the etchings as though it was predesigned as such.