Sunday, January 31, 2010

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.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

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