nashville, tn

Nashville rotary, motor, hull-mumble guitar pick-stumble — rattle shack cold and flecks of Tennessee snow through the slits in the neon lights — the river pulling up to bridge light, now ancient swing pulling the future towards the endless sound of music,, now the music pulling is towards the endless sound of the south pointing north by northwest ; now a sequence of hipster gold leafed, fine calligraphy, bulbed, flecked, rusted wood ornamentation – now floating , now rushing , now playing an old song through a new bedazzled vision – crushed red brick and the manufacture of sound, a commodity sandwiched between magic and craft beer — now the reverberation of applause stretches it’s tinny sound towards the reflection of the sky ; turned butter grey with January smile,, now I hunker towards the isolation of freedom – i grasp it with both hands – and pull. And listen

when the sky turned black

rapture fire wrapping up a continent in the consequence of constant careening away into carelessness — the charred fragments of millions of years, the indecency of the sky to relent; the tumult of gum trees ; and silent afternoon sounds i still remember, the hum of insect choirs bouncing across the land – the sun a little more golden, a little more holy than anywhere else;; the air a little more clean, a little more rich with sensation than anywhere else — a country that still calls to me in my deepest dreams, some songline screaming out — some prophet, some shaman of aboriginal dreamtime singing this is what you always had coming, when you turn your back on what is holding up your feet;; when you rip the ancient names away from the hillsides, when you tear the ancient knowledge from where it is hiding – in the cracks in the dry soil, in the windswept tumble clouds of dust that swell over the plains – when you plummet into the soil to suck what magma has turned fossils of old magic into your profit ; when you tear through the great barrier reef with ships that slice through coral like so much flesh being peeled — when the conquerers conquer nothing but stolen forgetting / when catastrophe rings like a thunderclap ringing back – no lightning here, but enough smoke to smell who lit the fire in the first place ;; no names for these forests anymore, the ancient or the new ones – now they blend into the night sky, all ash and charred root systems gone silent, no longer speaking, no longer singing the songlines through the continent — where are the songs now — do they travel as deep as the fossil fuels? baked in to the crust – are the songlines safe? can the singing be heard? is it escaped now – pluming up into the great cloud of smoke (the size of europe) — reaching its filthy hand towards the southern cross? caught red-handed, caught black handed – wretching towards the ones who stuffed a pipe into the songlines’ ancient throat, until it gagged, burst up singing flame — and sang until the song ran dry and the sky turned black – the notes drifting back into space like so many stolen stars returning home

it’s christmas and i miss you, of course. i feed my heart through a tube, i pull my musculature sideways through doors that used to fly open; i push through the melancholy; i miss your hands, the way my hand fit in yours, i miss your shoulder, and my head resting on it, i miss your laugh and the way your eyes light up when i say something that makes you laugh; i miss the way we get one another

---

this day won’t last forever; this moment won’t last forever; but here you are, 5 years old and curled up in my legs, all of our limbs reaching towards one another, in love; we look in to each other’s eyes like lovers – you ask for me to stay forever, i know it will never be hard for me to promise; the very best thing i’ve ever done; i bundle you, your little soft hair rubbing under my chin, a sickness in your chest that i can feel in my own body;; two everythings beating together

---

so much gratitude to be had; so much perspective; so much learning to be had – every day, the great unfolding, every day, partnering myself, holding my self close and teaching myself about how i want my life to be; about how i want to be – endlessly more patient, more loving; how i am doing so little if i am accomplishing personal goals but creating disharmony with the people around me; giving my life as a healer, in service to those around me; this should be the greatest accomplishment i focus on

i am thankful for my body in all its parts, strength and athleticism; thankful for my heart, it’s endless loyalty; thankful for my heartbreak, the way it keeps teaching me

 

scratched into my skin

Dear Benny,

Tonight I feel you everywhere. Your caustic voice, your rippling laugh, your eyes on me – a secret joke – your rough scratched beard a promise ; your caretaking a memory. The lights glow with that familiar warmth, the chords sing with some ancient harmony // the cup-sized friendship still holds water – your absence is everywhere though , sitting on the couch ; I do not want to glower in this feeling of aliveness; it feels somehow wrong ; I remember the care you gave others, the resonance of your sincerity, your advice, clear like a knife, rich with experience ; I remember your stories ; your late night lettuce theiving ;; some joke you are always playing on the world / the impossibility of your absence, the firmness of your presence in all of us ; the way our hearts are all scarred ; the way our scars show faultlines — tectonic plated ; aching love that burns deep ; rivers that peel canyons into stone // leaves marks ;; like so many scratched prison tattoos you pressed into your own skin ; like so many handmade tattoos you tried to teach me how to make – on some summer night when the music flowed out onto the side patio and the warm night air flooded the LED lights you brought to bring light to our magic – and my own virgin skin, my precious lack of understanding, only conceiving in imagination the reality that you bore, the thick reality of piercing yourself with handmade instruments in the loneliest of places – in solitary confinement, ratcheting new dreams onto your skin as a prayer, as a promise, to one day give your light, your art, dreams, back to us, and me, in my fragile understanding, undeserving of this momentous gift – the love and understanding you bestowed, like a prayer, like a promise, and the good works I must follow to the edge of visible light, past hardships I cannot conceive of except in imagination – to spread the light, to keep the promise, like so many handmade prison tattoos scratched into my skin – be that honest. Be that giving.

More than your conception can imagine.

pittsburgh, pa

hollowed city shell, laced with anthracite powder ; the coal sucked out of the ravines and side-stepped hills – heralding houses on houses; pulled, like molten ghosts – steel rapture , wrapping the rivers in a rolling fixation with the resemblance of reliability — this city pulled itself out of the hillsides with tools and black treasure, fumbled its way onto the landscape with sweat and sidelong glances into the future (that slowly but surely peeled away from it) ; rocket teeth, the brick and mortar make-shift rubber-wired splinter cell of this growth of steel and cement curls towards the new century, abandons its skeletons of iron and forge and builds shopping malls and sidewalks – i try to pronounce the native american name of this river in my head like a mantra, try to press that reality back into my consciousness / to honor the way the water ran before it was filled with soot and ash / i imagine , in some part of my brain that works beyond language , the names these hills once held, before they were marked and numbered for the black artificial gold within them ;; the energy it took to pull our country into the modern wasteland — the energy we squealed out of the earth ; the price we paid to lose our own magic \\ and this friday too, singed black on the edges , filled violently with the rage of consumerism bolting ; like the reanimated zombie energy of our black coal hands lighting into the night ;; let the night turn black again – released, gently, momentarily, into the golden endless light of stars laughing at us

like a dream of a static universe

I am chasing this little pink flash across the sky , on this, what is almost certainly a winter sunset now ; I am tracing the outline of the bare branches in the reflection on the water and trying to find the places where I went wrong / where I cracked in the growing outwards of my branches / I’m trying to learn / I am gazing up at what is a quickly darkening haze of hues and trying to place myself inside of my own world / trying to reach towards how to know what it is I need to know at any given moment ; on my long confusing journey towards this endless horizon we can never reach ; that is always just dipping beyond the edge of visible sight ; that is always just meeting the night where the day ends , somehow effortlessly at a fixed point in our vision ; like a dream of a static universe we are never actually standing in ; in a dream, as if time is one small step in front of the other ; and not an endless circling ; and not an endless expansion ; as if the trees are not rooting in deeper and reaching out higher – always for more light, more strength – never a fixed point in the soil, but an endless connection of bones and bloodlines ; like vertebrae through the happenstance little bundle of cosmic rock we happened to bumble out of // Hello sky ; hello to the endless calling out to the sky ; waiting for it to circle back around again

edge of the forest path, 12 years old

How the years have pulled me like a sideways cloud; drifting penniless through the aching twirl of new autumns gone by; how, when I was 12, I pressed my fresh footed boots into this soil ; cut my heart on the sides of tree branches ; placed promises to what I would be into the mud ; how we walked, we laughed, we gasped at the feelings that arose in our body like new strangers come to rest inside of us ; How we prayed for love like tattoos on our flesh ; wondering how free we’d get to be when we were no longer 13 ; stuck in the middle of a flesh hurricane ; a puberty pressure pressing us into the sidewalk like daisy chains into cement / a love letter written with mascara on a pillar of marble / How many times I walked down this path pressing some name onto my lips like a ritual ; an obsession with setting myself away from the line of squares that lined up geometrically ; and when the bell rang. how I filled my pockets with acorns; or laid in the dirt under the stars and giggled until I knew how to giggle in a way that was socially appropriate ; how I learned to tuck my hair behind my ear ; pull a ribbon into it ; check my makeup in the mirror ; how I learned to girl, to woman, to grow and to shrink; how we best friended down the woodland path ; how our lives stretched out in 1,000 different directions: my friends, my friends ; and what I didn’t know ; what I didn’t know ; how to recognize the sound of the wind; the sound of my child’s laughter; the sound of my heart beating against the waves of some distant shore // When holy meant the edge of the forest path because the forest was unwalked; unknown; or if I had walked it – the small space it covered in this small town was a wild mystery large enough in itself to span several countries in the imagination ;; when sacred was the tiny comfort of being seen by two small eyes on a lonely big world not big enough for me yet

when the sun comes back around

And now the first hardness forms; the crinkle paper tissue firmament on the water – The cracking of the first ice cooling together at the end of this autumn / the slashes in the shapes that form like broken stars ebbing towards one another / and here the leaves still hold their gold : the sun still flecks through the quickly chilling air ; but my hands quiver and my foolish heart knows not one ray of light from the other ; but still hunts for endless summer, still begs for the day to rise longer, truer ;; this growth is like an up-ended backbend ; it doesn’t feel like growth at all ; feels like cutting off limbs and letting them sink into the ice tipped water / strength is something I am told to have / love is something I will never not feel in every cell of my body like some endless curse I am always walking in / the ground is covered in gold too – now the fallen just resting in puddles – everything that was created this year resting now silently on the ground – about to molt together into one another in the icy blush of burrowing away into the old soil and the new; to be reborn again when the sun comes back around ; when the sun comes back around ;;

and me I twist my soul to the sky – try to air it out – try to let it fly again ; and me I resemble this soft pale November cloud ; I float, grazing the atmosphere, touching blue, I do not belong in this sky / and here just the crunchy tips of the water fold their hands together, Make solid what was once liquid ; but still, it is liquid just underneath the fine filament of hardness that is crusting on the top – the hardness that is making star shapes splinter across what used to flow in the wind; and remains now still ;  silent ;

not enough frenzy

Thunderclap and lightning vow; the final bow of the faded glory season; sings its silent leaf falling song; fills up the still water with reflections of leaves gone by; now gathering like apples bobbing, gathering in clumps; entropy and wishbone cloud formations; fumbling together like friends at the top of the water; like a rainbow of lily pads leaning towards the russet hues; and here the hollows – The ghosts are nothing more than laughs on the ripples; we sit watching the season grasp towards the light; we cackle towards the horror; the perversion of what is so obviously benign and beautiful; the forest displayed in hungry colors; not a death march, but a celebration of release / This cacophony of creation at its final interpretation; nothing scary about it , this world of branches and brambles and the way fog floats through the forest under the October moon ; nothing scary about it , the way we hold our hearts like half-remembered song lines; drilled out of the earth; like so many pipelines fracking for something real; for the freedom to pipe our fresh songlines back into our lungs ; so many ancestors forgotten ; like so many traditions pushed down the river in a basket , dumping out to the polluted Hudson , fumbling towards the endless plastics of the ocean / bones rattle in the branches ; old ancestor disappointment – at how we forget everything, fear everything, pervade our corrosion of disconnection into a paradigm of gore and gush;

This family of ducks weaves their way between the new terrain; the freshly assembled families of leaves in their water; as more fall around them gently, gently, gracefully, gracefully

I will never stop being disappointed in our society; in how we peel away from the precious; how we skitter away from the sacred; and coerce every sleeping promise of connection towards the hacked up reverie of some feverish frenzy towards the frantic ferocity of fear;; too much fear, not enough frenzy

fuzzy starlight

rough-bellied open wound, sore casket ;; when the Band-Aid comes off the blood better be ready to rush / your head in my hands, a scraggle faced prayer , something I have grown into , a rush I never knew would mean this much to me ; a head I never imagined would fit my hand so elegantly / no one knows where the end of the thread is / and when it hurts it hurts like hell

well that’s the thing about people ;; there’s never gonna be another you / there’s never gonna be anyone who holds their back up exactly the way that you do ,  anyone who makes me laugh just the way that you do , and you can’t write the list down , of the qualities and conditions , you can’t quantify it // you can hardly hold it in your fingers for long enough before it flashes off again / you made me feel like a thousand dizzy dreams / you looked at me like you could see the stardust inside of me / I can only hope to make someone feel as magical as you make me feel

and still somehow again the ocean feels so wide; so deep to swim and still somehow again I wish I could place the fuzzy starlight back into your eyes ;; I wish i could plunge the fairy dust into your throat again ; pearl the silent memories through your hair / I wish autumn would come with no change ;; the evergreen forest of this brief love, always green, always green // I wish Time would let me hold it in my hand ; and let me hold it as long as I need to , before the sun calls me again down that road , that dusty time clock peeling away in every direction ;; I wish my life did not look through ten thousand windows of possibilities , always framed , lacey curtains billowing in some almost life ; I wish my life was a solid path I could not walk off of ;; a thousand maybes falling off the branches of the trees ; i wish i could stand the thought of not being inside of in a thousand golden shimmering leaves twirling around me ;; I don’t want to get old / I don’t want to lose magic / I want to keep spinning out like a star full of baubles and bursts; steady in the clear stream of sapped air trapped staring // i wish i could live in between the light and what it hits; it between the light and what it makes perceivable;; in between the light and what percieves it – inside of the fuzzy starlight between us