Five of these days, one each of the last five years,
I have been in the cyclical existence of hell,
and while the promise given is for there to be no more tears,
It’s not looking very well.
For if there is a heaven, and I get to see you there,
I’ll offer you a promise you can be sure that I will keep.
The next time I lay touch upon your golden hair,
I assuredly will weep.
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.
My heart pounding, bags at the chair, I’m ready to leave… for the minute?, hour?, day?? I don’t know, but I feel my heart ready to explode. I say I’m leaving, just ok. We embrace, my heart is pounding, surely you’ll feel it and say something. Nothing is said. My hearts beats faster. Time to pull away, you still embrace, say nothing. I grab my bags, unlock the door, silence is walking out with me. I say I love you, you say I love you back, nothing more.
You walk by me and your phone is in your hand, head down. You walk by me and head away. I am left to sit or follow. You walk by and smile. Head down, phone out, up to closing of door. I am left to sit or follow. You walk by me and your hand reaches out to graze me, your gaze head down phone out.
I had a dream this morning. I shared and cried about it this morning. I had a dream where I was crying and mourning and I shared about that this morning. I am in mourning this morning.
Christmas I say is sad, I found an ornament. I say it is sad that I haven’t bought new ornaments in a long long time, the newest one I found yesterday. It was sad to find the ornament, the newest ornament, it’s wreath of Heaven Baby, ornament. This is why I don’t like to decorate, find new ornaments, it’s just sad.
It’s a sad ornament filled, I’m in mourning and your head is more often lately in your phone, I am having anxiety, you’re probably going to give me grief over this act of grief and lack of acknowledgment, and the day is going to be your family decorating with ornaments, will I might get accused of abandoning you all while I’m expected to sit extremely uncomfortably, and I got a lot going on and things I should be doing other than being made to feel like a what’s your problem and probably won’t check in on me, kind of morning.
I’ll go grocery shopping instead.
The love I give has continued to pour … fill full and pour more. The source of this love has been questionable for an unknown amount of time now. I can’t say when it refills or how. I can’t say why it keeps giving or what it’s motive has become. For it has been a wounded well since our time has begun. Before my bucket was used to fill your cup, before I knew you had needed more than me to fill it up, I had to re-mortar the bricks that contains the courage, just enough. The job was done in haste and maybe some despair, but I knew would hold with gentle care. If gentle hands pulled my rope, centered it with purpose and I’d bring up the liquid hope. My plan was to pour into you with all I could hold and refill so quickly that the exchange of warmth from my source to your vessel would never go cold. To keep releasing all into your hands for you to drink me, take in my delivery. To just empty over and over again… and then… I realized I was over pouring. Your hands were always open, to receive from any duct that gave attention. They always stayed ajar and your mind took note to the sources that weren’t too far. And in the brief moments when my pouring slowed down to a drip, so I could take a moment to evaluate the dripping in which I’ve been slipping, created by the spill over from the tipping over of other pitchers into your serving cup, you keep putting at my table to serve you up, and in those brief moments of when I drip, you sip from another drip line filling you up and clog up mine. Then you hold up your hands and all the love pours out. Every drop and drip from my heart spout and it stutters at its source, and I have to realign my lines, my strings, my handle, my encasing. I have to retrace the rebuilding of my walls and all my compartments, are they intact, where do I lack? What’s wrong with my pouring? How is my all not enough? Then I see that a segment of my wall has been sloughed. Etched with drills of a version of love that made my exterior soft, while my love just kept pouring right past this love blinding blind spot. Picked at quietly as I kept flowing on by, wondering about the little streams that kept seeping awry. Thought the loss was from the tears that I cried. But it was lack of care that degraded my interior. Pulling and releasing my rope at commanding positions creating tensions unexpectedly and force back of slack, slapping into my mortar. Close by are your hands prying down my border. Close are your hands being filled by others, allowed to slip in to where my everflow never stops it’s flow. And leaves me to wonder where my love is to go. Leaves me to wonder will your hands ever close? Will you ever be able to wrap them around my well, only open for pour, from my lovings course, only embrace and drink from my love source?
More dreams. They only get more twisted. Taking my hopes as hostage and rendering them listless. Making sense of everything’s nothing. And -nothing- makes sense. Rising up, more like a limbo., seeking to find what is it of truth I may know. I feel like I am reaching into a melting pot and the ideas are ripe and the fruit is not. How do I get back to the feeling of elevating where the words spoken are the rhythms validating love. Endlessly. Entirely giving more more more. Still wanting to give more more more. But silence, it is misleading. Gaps are filled with meaningless pleading to an empty space. The wetness is recognized by my face and the facing of history in retrace mode. Please, I beg myself. Do not implode. Not again. Not this time. Rise up and receive the divine. Maybe In Time I will see and we will see. Maybe in time it will all make sense to me. But while time dares to not pass, I stretch my heart thin and it shatters like the glass. The same glass that I built my hearts house with, transparent and breakable in the name of love. Transparent and and breakable in the name of love. Transparent and breakable in the name of love.
This is the face of love. Each time my heart is touched by love it is etched in my soul. It creates a path of proof through the smile’s lines of love’s joy and laughter. Then wanders through the brow’s furrow of love’s wonder. It penetrates the pores pouring from love’s pain. Love looks like this.
This is the face of desperation. Pleading for the pain to process and bring peace. Begging for release from the bindings and shackles of shame from continually feeling this way. Bargaining no more, but blinded by defeat. Desperation looks like this.
This is the face of hope. Recognizing that this is a moment of an awareness of raw experience and reality. Lit up briefly by the reflections of the tears sweet brilliance of beaded reckoning. Relinquishing the idea that I have to keep it festered and vested in the cavity my soul reveals as wounded. Hope looks like this.
This is the face of disgust. Putting too much sacred deliverance into a space already self filled. Giving with relentless effort to offer more just to prove worth to the takers who’ve passed on praise. Inflicting a self imposition and acknowledgement of misalignment. Self, not self. Disgust looks like this.
This is the face of bewilderment. Standing in a cleansed body state of muddled mind. Perceptions shifting and breathing brings only moments of mild mannered transitions. In disbelief with feeling of washed over and sharing poses more as imposition, overlooked and taken for granted. Bewilderment looks like this.
This is the face of strength. Grimace and regrouping, bawling and growing. Perseverance begins to permeate after repeated experience. Going in as a dove, coming out scorched dark, now a raven, yet continually still it flies. Rising to the challenge baffling the deliverer of discourse. Strength looks like this.
This is the face of grief. The sudden onset of not understanding that operations continue. Disbelief of lack of attentive heart compassing language and cognition. Wayside, left in wonder. Sad overcame by weight weighed by a judge of less caliber. Cast aside and left alone in the debris of dismantling. Grief looks like this.
It’s not safe here anymore. Maybe it is safer. I feel stuck between loving myself and being a self hater. Traitorous to what is reality mostly because I am confused by the indiscrepancies of what I see or think is me. But who am I kidding? It’s me, I’m the joke running. Only fooling the messenger who is delivering the ammunition gunning my own self down, I’ve stitched a target in the threading of each gown that I wear, each item I put on, it’s just a matter of time, I’m not sure just how long it will take for me to be blamed for another mistake. Another settling down from the the shit I create. The things I make up in my mind. It comes cued in, right in time and in line with any hope that “I’m better” … in short that’s the descriptive head letter. Short hand expresses the energies lessened and the dread of resent is moreover presented.
It’s always been a path that has twisted the second I have put my foot upon what was perceived as stable earth. Especially any time I have made any proclamation of change or declarative to myself. Or anyone else for that matter. There was never really a beginning step, nor do I see the paths direction clearly now.
It has an air of taste but not fully indulge, regardless of the all you can eat buffet. It is the holding back children from the desert bar after eating all their dinner. A reminder to the senses that they are only in control of detecting deliciousness but not given the utensils to fulfill the salivation for hope and fulfillment.
Looking into the mirror has been a ritual in compartmentalism and I think I have become the pastor of preaching projection. The imagery that I am seeing in this reflection is of generic body parts and decorations on the anatomy. it’s not a clear picture, it is a bit foggy. And yet it is clearly seen as a component for an opportunity to critique my whole self, none the matter of the bold attempt to witness through another’s observation.
Moments of beauty linger still and wrap their scent stamp of importance. immersing ideas that memory and present agenda can somehow coexist. Breathing in a breath that was taken years already before and freshly adorned with a sound. This envelopment of calming acceptance has been trying to guide an old soul. The urgency of anew has been heeded. Moving into the fog has been the design all along.
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
Grief,
It comes out of nowhere. It tells you the truth that lies want to use as a cover. It sections off nothing and offers no disclosure.
Grief,
It is allusive and gives no remorse. It sanctions nothing as sacred and promises to contort. It gives a visual of hope and has only desolation to report.
Grief,
It is forced upon those who are desperately trying to heal. It comes full force when Love is the life’s appeal. It transitions hope into a perspective of false ideals.
Grief,
It has become an inebriation. It transforms love into devastation. It gives face of light and darkens the illumination.
Grief,
It has made me monstrous. It has erased all forms of calming guidance and patience. I have become brutal and callous.
Grief,
I no longer know what to expect from me. It has taken my dreams and defecated on my reality. I am no longer who I want to be.
the Proverbial Phoenix 