A new wardrobe

Peace, settle in.
It's a new weight to carry,
this calm,
silence in places where noise vibrated out.
I wear a new skin that craves simple
presence.
I want to stop and feel the slight shift in my surroundings,
I don't need to run through it and ignore what lessons it could teach.
Floating, being, resisting. I push back against the frenzy.
Assess and breathe. Feel what comes out.
Sigh, love. And you? Hope. You wear a different look today.
You're still enough for me to appreciate
your many facets.

Balancing the mixture

Too much sugar, we were. Hungry yeast, ravenous yeast, ate too quickly.
So much sustenance, it was, we were
consuming too quickly.
Not conserving; not mindful.
We soon became a sour, acidic dough, that could not rise.
Drowning, was I, in the alcohol. The by-product of our over-eager love.

Work in slowly. Balance me with honey and flour and water.
A little salt.
Cool temperatures, a slow rise. The right length of time,
monitor this,
mind this.
Watch it grow, double. Push it down. Re-build when we fall. Stronger, better structure,
a fashioned interior.
Perfect holes, an airy crumb.
Desire me. Desire us.

You, me.

Flutter open heart again. Let in slowly, absorb what you are giving me.
So sudden.
So easy.
A battered piece is gliding once again. Smoothly, aware.
Patient, this is growing. Yeast working through gluten. Strands forming and stretching. Carbon dioxide giving height,
and texture.
Slip in, stay awhile.

Morning run, trails. Sea.

Crispy wind flows through my arms and down my back.

Crash, waves. foamy sea, high on slick crags. Uneven rocks, winding dirt.

Desert flowers. Snapping sounds, tapping feet, rhythmic pulse and oxygen surges. Lungs sting and pull in sweet air. Birds, you point out, are giving us a soundtrack this morning.

We are part of it, the dirt is pulling us in and releasing us back. It is slighlty comfortable.

Prefumo canyon, morning visit

Stubborn fog clings in the oaks
Verdant, deep green circles the valley and chokes out the drying grass on steep slopes.
Contrast
life-seeking leaves and grass that grew and gave up
parched mixes into veritable shades of browns and greens, dotting the hills.
Mountains, ancient and rocky, fight for higher air, beating up against each other, reaching upward.
A new valley now. Thick apple orchards swimming together in one whole piece. New fruit waits for autumn hands to come,
to grasp and pull the sweet globes.
Sticky juice prepares to run down chins.
Fog lifts as the valley winds south. Salty air smacks into the rich fruit-infused layer
and the dry grass gives off its unmistakable perfume.

Growing season

Our garden has no order. Carefully sown seeds sprouted and buried deep
in the rich soil. Carrots on top of lettuce on top of
basil, and tomatoes. We tried lots of tomatoes.
Corn in the middle. Always in the middle.
I'm coming out, too. We're trying this together.
Sun, full-sunny days and a nutrient-rich environment.
Soft substrate. Caring hands around.
We'll be fruitful this year and we'll nourish. Swelling fruit and spicy herbs. Sweet lavendar,
sensuous and subtle. Oregano and onions.

Casting a net, casting you away

You drifted into my dreams this morning
those early morning dreams, where the feeling stays with you
sometimes all day.
You were this beautiful un-graspable thing,
which was mostly true.
And I woke up sad, realizing you are truly gone now.
I'm splitting our friendship, I'm casting you away.
Circular net, thrown out in a perfect pancake circle.
to catch bait fish.
Heart, move on. Heart let go.

Anymore

The view from your bed
was not quite as peaceful as had seemed, in my reveries.
The leafless trees, dead.
The air, dry.
Your grasp feeling different.
Home is not in your arms
anymore.

The answer to my question

I'm slipping away from you.
That old familiar feeling of my heart detaching,
unwinding itself from your grasp,
and smelling freedom.
I've learned how to live without you. It hardly leaves a sting now.
It used to be a slice.
Cold, and deep, splitting.
It's liberating to find answers now,
the discovery of mixed-up questioning, festering beneath.
I know now.
My heart, my personality does not belong under your control
or in a foreign land.
I'm going home now.
Relieved.

Love

Crazy to love someone so far away. Crazy to continue this splattered, scattered, nonsensical affair. Crazy to continue.
The madness, oh, the madness.
Let go. Hold on. Draw close. Release.
I release you. You wrap me back in.
Drawing me, drawing me.
You allow me to leave. I break, but you linger,
lingering, pausing.
We are no longer in control of this.
It has taken its own shape and formed a life of its own,
with its own personality.
Capricious and moody,
but planted,
rooted.
Still rising, climbing, wrapping around
your heart and mine.

Give and take

Today driftwood piles were washed up
and the outline of the shore pushed itself higher up on the beach.
Like a bully, the moon-guided waves made their way forward, oblivious to the sand's feeble attempts to stop the water's reach through hopeful barriers of sand.
Every morning, a new world.
A seascape with entirely different architecture,
no two same designs ever erected.
Choppy sand, footprints melding into lumpy hills.
Crashing water, a surprising roar, followed by the purest clarity.
When the ocean is silent, it envelops the surrounding air
its absence, painful in its peace.
Plovers race out, their tiny talons sinking in the hungry substrate,
the silent surroundings their first opportunity to seek food.
Fickle and greedy, the water re-forms itself
reappearing with a vengeance
it picks up a pile of driftwood
sweeping the beach
giving and taking.

Poetry

These words are spilling out of me. They are
saving me.
In the obsidian places of my mind, which lately, overrun the incandescent thoughts,
free verse, an anthology of greats,
are holding me together.
Once you become attuned, it's amazing how you find it
poetry, everywhere.
My favorite songs speak to me in their simple expression.
The unexplainable becomes less opaque when the form to express it is not as
governed.
I am saved by a compilation, near my bed. I read it and am connected with others who found a new salvation
by simply writing how they feel.
Words coalesce, sentences form
throughout the day.
And sitting, pausing, they are released. I am freed.
As I escape, the dark is washed, ebony strands drip. Ochre falls. My mind comes together,
whole.
Light, silvery, pure, replaces.
Heals.

First Kiss

He makes her a meal.
Pork, potatoes.
They flirt, lapse into a long conversation on the couch. The fire crackles.
Red wine turns into white, as they sip through their stories. Mix, pink, it becomes in their bellies.
Fuzzy, the room swirls. She doesn't want to leave, he would ask that she stay.
Pulls herself away, sways toward the door. A jacket is produced from the closet. He helps her slip it on.
It reaches to her knees.
He fills up a water container, in case she becomes parched on the drive home. Better judgement would force her to stay.
But the wine is pink now, mixed.
He helps her zip up the coat. A gesture, so tender, and perhaps the most romantic in her life. He is still a stranger, though less than before.
Outside, the cold air, she clutches the water container. Nervous now.
Embrace. Long. Slight turn of the heads, a meeting.
Lips introducing themselves, tongues, mouths.
Butterflies, heart vessels working, veins filling. Indescribable synapses firing. Un-nameable hormones and fluids injecting. Happiness is chemically produced. Endorphins settling.
They pull away, finally, though both would prefer to stay. The moon is almost overhead.
Something passes between them.
It remains and gets comfortable.

Fears

I fear I won't love again--this kind of love, even if I lived where I belong. The place where dry grasses and oaks absorb me. Vineyards, voluptuous grapes, black cattle with white faces, surround me.
Rocky peaks, the shiny ocean, careless parties, and connections enclose me. Memories, a soft shelter that took me from a girl
to a woman.
Formed me.
The very air holds me. Surrounds me and reassures me,
"If I took you from that, to this, what could you become?"
But you, you alone,
broke me.
And yet, you still hold my laughter.
You changed the very shape of my heart. You redefined my possibilities. You are still the question
to my future.

An affair, of sorts.

Red cool wine. Deepest truth, conjured forth. Finally. You are here, still. So real, just below the surface now showing your truth. It's hard to describe how much I miss you, and how conflicted I truly am.
Two loves, have I. I'm in love with a land, a place. And you, my abode. In two separate places, you are, dividing my heart.

Enigma, our love.

I could hop in the car and be there in four days. Three, if I drove fast. Trees, leaves down, trampled and crinkly and crispy, beneath our feet. Cool steam rising from the lakes in the morning. Our laughs echoing, to us.
If I love you this much, why do I resist? In spite of all the damage I've done, we could have that again. If I hopped in the car.
Responsibility fades my resolve. But not my love. Obviously.
I love what I'm not near, I pine for what is not in my fingertips. I covet what I can't see. I gloss over the imperfections, when they're not in my line of sight. I desire you most when you're not touchable.

Spring mornings, weekends.

Windows open, warm breeze sifting through the screen
like a sieve.
Buzzing insect sounds filter in. The heavy, wet air stays out. Cardinals in the morning. Deep, deep red feathers. Melodious songs to each other. A new symphony in the trees with conductors we couldn't see.
Dog paws, muted by the carpet. She springs up and flops down, deeply sighing.
His funny rhymes and morning games. Lingering, lingering. And out the window, when I flop over, just leaves. Miles and miles of green.
Fuzzy dreams still alive, the nonsensical coming back in waves, through feelings instead of pictures.
I go to leave. He pulls me closer. Promises of coffee, and juice.
He loved his morning nectar.

Gelatinous Heart

Jelly-like heart. Runny, like threads of kombucha. Transparent, and sometimes
on my sleeve.
Flexible and invisible it can wrap itself around your confusing, ever-changing direction. Today it can love you and tomorrow it will find a new direction, and lust, maybe. A new lust.
It used to be a whole piece. Red and plastic-y, shaped in the traditional manner. It was bolder and held fast. Until it broke and re-built itself into a jelly blob that moves and can love you and hate you in the same incandescent strand.

Coffee shop scene in a superficial island

Plastic people all trying to be the same thing. The same idol
instead of accepting who they are and finding their own strengths. They focus outward and
they covet.
It's so heavy, the air is sticky with it, their coveting.
Young girls walk in, legs still fresh with new skin. Skirts too short. Makeup too heavy.
Everyone looks. Everyone covets.
Men, they gape, and fantasize, and undress them in their heads. These fragile girls, who don't yet know there's a surface beneath the shell,
a trickle. Depth, it could become, if they cultivate the spring. Dew would turn into an ocean.
But they rejoice in their young skin and celebrate their fresh lives in a world where they're only valued for the surface.
Because they, too, covet.

Tomorrow is another day. Closer, I hope, to peaks jutting out from downtown.
And hope--mostly. Dreams there. Deferred, as some may say. But not really. Just on pause, perhaps. Just waiting until more lessons seep through this slightly pale, but muscular, in the right light, skin.
Wonder, I do, too, whether he will truly come.
Risk, he never was one to take, or venture far. Decisions, really, split us. He called me hasty. Often.
But I follow where I feel led, while he stays, firmly entrenched, like the byssal threads of mussels that cling to sea-washed rocks. Powerful, foamy waves come, beating repeatedly against the surface, but he remains.
Stubborn.
I wonder if this could be a true love story? Could he chase what he probably needs--but do I?

When I baked a lot of bread.

Yeasty bread, the swollen dough beneath my fingers. And the tackiness of the gluten, sticky. Hot cornmeal,steamy on the stone. Aromas intoxicating in my lungs.
Music beats in the background carrying with them memories of older love and vineyard-bedecked fields with serpentine roads. Hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Sweet memories I have, of those bread-filled days and a belly, too full, perhaps. But a heart, too. Of love and dinner parties with friends, coming together to share community, to build together sticks propped against each other. Tepees of friendship the wind couldn't knock down.
But sometimes love is too simple, and days in a snow globe (without snow) seem suffocating. So she packs up her car. Because adventure calls and texture beckons. She realizes she needs more scratchy wool and rough corduroy there, in her life.
It's hard to get back into the snow globe, the perfect world, where it's often windy, but the bread tastes good.

living in the wrong place

To feel again, I remember, sometimes, those days. When colors were richer and salty water didn't fall so easy from these cloudy eyes. Dark lashes framing, blinking, but the pain.
The shell that is me now until I'm brought out by memories and music and earth moving swiftly beneath my feet. I think of those trees and the lakes and the roots half covered by decaying leaves from the previous autumn.
Heart pumping and lungs expanding and swirling oxygen saving me, somehow. Here where I don't belong.
And the weekends, I dread. The weight settles then, in my shoulders,
mostly.
His calls are a clean wisp, a slight lift,
but the unnecessary questioning of choices accompanies our conversations then.

Explanation

there we were, crumpled,
yet again.
but I didn't yet realize how heavy that choice would weigh. I didn't anticipate the regrets that would follow me,
across all those state lines.
What is the color of regret? Deep swirling reds, mixed with blues, creating a heavy purple.
cloudy, mostly. cloudy colors.
they still wash over me and I have to let go and recognize we are not meant to always understand why we have to walk away.
Why I'm led by strings I cannot see, creating paths that only make sense to my eyes.
And still, if I were to explain, you may not accept my apology.
For I left you there, and I felt your brokenness,
but I didn't understand.
I didn't understand how deep that tear felt when I took both sides of our lives and ripped them in half, making a ticker-tape parade of our life together. Scattered bits of paper that swirl in the wind, showing their weakness.
But don't worry. I still feel it too.
There are no winners in this game.

after the decision.

how many bottles I went through, that winter, and spring,
into the summer.
And probably the fall.
Each glass, I hoped, would bring you out and leave me free from memories and wishes not realized.
the dark swirl, the hazy feelings, the deep mornings, interrupted by light, and a need to keep moving,
to keep tapping it out, through the trees
with sweat trickling down my arms
because I could run it away for a time.

carolina nights

I remember those nights
the summer, with the trees full, heavy from the green and the weight of their life.
Frogs, the creakers, you called them
their serenade, simple, every night, synchronized with the wind, lightly dancing off the plush canopy
and you gently breathing
coming in and out of my heart
covers kicked off
feet poking out
your long legs, so strong, like steel
and heavy, when you draped them over me
your naked body, so suspicious you never realized how beautiful you were to me.

Home

The air there swirls in a different manner.
and the morning bougainvilleas swell from the heaviness of their color,
magenta. Which is a hard color to wear well.
The clouds roll in
and out differently
and the bikes are parked at odd angles, shuffled together
the simplicity of their mechanics,
oblivious.
The freedom, and the breath that rolls down the mountains--
right in the middle of town,
they give,
they exhale,
and I am home.

For C

you still come to mind
and I wonder why we're still possible, through the crinkles
and the wine.
Oh, the endless wine.
But you still flow through me,
in my veins,
you are the wine swirling through my heart