Frazzle

Breathing in just sort of happens

but the breathing out

feels like an unwinding of all the tension...

all the 

too-many-thoughts

all the 

unfinished plans.

I'm sure I'm forgetting important pieces of the

pie (night)

important aspects of the lovely surprises I'm planning 

for the lov-ed ones I'm 

loving...

I should relax more and breathe more and remember

that's why I'm doing all these things

and enjoy the process of creating the conditions for memories to be made.

Reset Button

It was a perfect day,
started off with a bang.
Well rested
well bedded,
I headed
into the day like a train shooting down the tracks.
Stolen sips of forbidden caffeine
(warm, hazelnutty),
dragged me through my to-do list
slashing through completed items like jet-fueled Zoro.
The evening brought dinner with friends
and baseball with enemies
(same people, different colored shirts),
and a victory that didn't feel as good to me as it would have to them.

Through it all,
my mind swam with images.
Echoes of Friday night's lopsided conversation
and tilted world
bouncing around in my peripheral -
did I really say that?
Did you?
It's hard to remember that foggy world,
through all of today's clarity,
but I'm pretty sure there was some fucked up shit that went down
     verbally.
But I still wanted more.
I don't even know what itch that scratched,
but it did -
those conversations
make me stretch contentedly
like a cat getting up from a long, cozy nap.

Full Moon Fever

I'm feverish
talking more than usual
(hardly seems possible, I know)
and entirely without a filter.
I type all the words
and then I delete half of them -
the world shrinking back to its usual size when I do so;
contained,
breathable,
navigable.
I feel almost unhinged,
but remain connected more securely than it seems.
I flutter in the wind,
free and wild,
but not quite out of control.
No, I like to say
I have no self-control,
but I exercise an
utterly extraordinary
amount of self-control
every
(damn)
day
when I manage to refrain from touching you at all,
let alone in all the places I want to.

The moon is fat, round, glowing -
filling the horizon with its cool, reflected sunlight.
And I am tossed about by its gravitational pull on the earth -
the tides of me ebb and flow,
a calm lapping of waves on sand
and a great arcing surf,
each in its turn.

Reminiscence

Sweater season is BACK!
And that reminded me of this post.
Yum.

You

You are a field of calm strength.

I could hurl myself against you,

with giggles or growls

for an eternity,

and you would never be breached.

But 

don't you 

sometimes

just want to lie in the sunshine

in the cool green grass

and let the whole world flow through you?

Because it could,

it does - 

just clear your mind

and allow it all, 

the peaceandjoy
the birthanddeath
the ebbandflow the laughter...

it could all be contained in you

or me.

And don't you sometimes wish you could take some of that

and let it flow out of you and into me?

Bodies are the metaphor and the reality;

they are too real to be beautiful

but so beautiful in their realness.

I don't know

any

thing.

Scattered Stars

Watching Lady Gaga in the movie tonight,
I was struck by her character's inability to believe she was worthy of fame
all because of her nose...
And the power she held
in spite of
(the nose on her face)
was kind of thrilling.
It kind of reminded me of
The Ex
just the other day
showering me with praise,
(the you-should-believe-in-yourself kind)
and then declaring that instead of trying to please everyone
all the time,
I should consider
that it might be time
for me to tell them all
to just
FUCK OFF.
Hm...
I like it.

Well, anyway.
The movie had me.
It folded me into its embrace,
and fed me all the goodness I crave -
a scruffy-as-fuck Bradley Cooper,
deep, bluesy rock,
a girl with a big nose
(the likes of which I haven't seen since  Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing)
and an empahsis on writing -
oh sure, her voice was the highlight,
rich and husky and so Gaga-licious,
but she wrote her own songs,
and that was cooool, man, cool...
There were cheesy parts;
and I hated the ending,
but maybe I won't think about the part that made me cry
and why it made me cry,
or the long conversation I had with nobody,
while the final song was being sung.
Because that shit is complicated.
And I'd rather focus on the way it felt to be Gaga for 2 hours,
and to think of the soft rain
that misted the air
as we wove our way through the darkness
and back to our happy little home;
I'd rather lean back in my writing chair and smile
when my sweet man says,
Yeah, but your tits are better than Gaga's
(I giggle my assent, and say, But I'll take her tiny waist any day...)
and then I turn up Ella Fitzgerald and remind him that I need to concentrate...
Not that this quite counts as writing,
it's sort of the palate cleansing, the decluttering of the brain waves,
but when he speaks my thoughts scatter like a bowl of rice knocked from a counter...

I've been listening to the Lumineers all week.
The last time I listened to this album so incessantly
was on my ten-thousand-mile roadtrip,
from the center of our country to the east coast,
then the west coast,
and back to center -
(like a warm-up stretch, but larger-than-life).
This album pulls me back to that hot, long summer -
all those hours of solitude,
driving from state to state,
ocean to ocean.
I keep getting stuck on "Dead Sea,"
because it played as I drove through Utah's Salt Flats,
and out to the Great Salt Lake,
which I used to hear described as America's Dead Sea.
That drive,
and subsequently that album,
stir up some memories,
like a pile of fallen leaves.

Dry/Heat

Soft red sands dance across broad curves of red rock.

The heat presses down from the cool blue sky,

presses up from the oven-like earth,

sucking the water from my cells.

I will dry up and tumble away

like the husk of a once-green bush

blowing across the backdrop of an old Western.

A rhythm (like small beans in a maraca)

erases my breath as I pause to scan--

the coil of scales in shades of brown

perches on the far embankment,

and I breathe again.

The memory of a stream,

this arroyo is a note left to remind the desert to run out for supplies—

pick up some eggs, bread, and definitely               
                     some water.