A Heart Insane in the Snow and Getting Home Late, Let Me Watch
March 17-24 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
3/17: I watch the smoke and think of surrender. My white jeans get filthier & filthier & I've got work in an hour. Sunday, your morning storm shook me dissatisfied. No surprise.
Too often I want to be what anyone else wants me to be. In my retreat to language I am, yes, slowly undressing my identity. All these layers. I am wading in my disconnect today - I am the only one who has a say. Today, it is not about escape, but validation, to see my footprint in the snow.
Sunday, I am floating in your run-off after the storm, unsure of what that makes me. A couple years ago, I wrote often of disappointment when I knew there was magic (right in front of me, right in front of me). For the last year, I keep hearing that I am too hard on myself (who wouldn’t be, who wouldn’t be if they were me). If it is true that the ways I've learned to love myself are too dependent on all the ways I want to be and my own inconsistency, then yes, I am often washed away w/ the storm, impatient and made of mud.
We do not disappear w/out validation. Our shadows stay the same size. Those who love us continue to love us. Like a lighter low on butane & a heavy wind kissing nimble sparks, only extinguishing. Sunday, I wish I was who you wanted me to be. It's not often, but sometimes I think of everyone who has dared to love me or care about me and I try to imagine the G they hold onto. All different sides of the same die.
Would I be more complete if I leaned against my instincts? Would I be more loved? Would I understand myself more clearly if I stopped interrupting? If I was the person my cats think I am (my girl asleep on my lap for as long as I let her, on my lap forever). If I was who my lover thought I was all those years ago or if I had stayed that way or if I was only the good parts. If I could grow like he has, better and better - imagine. If I could be the friend my friends want me to be, if I could intuit their needs, if I could just be more happy and more free. If I was who my parents want me to be, making something of this life and this body. If I could be how my ex-lovers and ex-admirers saw me, and the dreamers who dreamed of me, who they thought I could be - what would I be? Am I who I am in the similarities of their dreams or in the contradictions? And what parts of me are still raging of non-conformity?
I look at my feet, at my beat up patent leather, and I look to see what I stand for, what I stand against, if the ground I stand on is concrete or sand or mud. I see if I can keep myself in balance no matter what I stand on, see how much of me is left standing when the world shakes. What would I do if I never lost belief in myself, what would that make me? What would I write if I was everything you wanted? Maybe the world would read me then, maybe life would invite me out to play.
The compulsive corners of the self, the non-conforming shadows, all the lovers and losers I've revealed myself to be. What do my words dress me as? When I think of myself, I am naked no matter what.
“I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.”
Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
I know how to simply be. I just don't know what that makes me, where that takes me, what it really matters at the end of me. Consistently inconsistent, chaos born to me - the spindle, the gift the world gave. I breathe each day in brand new, taste each day differently. And if I am love, then I do not belong only to me anyway.
So I am still working, still raging, still disappointed - less that I am not what everyone wants me to be & more that I am not all I want myself to be (OK I’ll say yet ). I am happening to myself and taking my time w/ it. I go out to play anyway. The world doesn't concern itself w/ forgiveness, I will learn along the way. I learn I am more tolerant when I am fickle than when I am predictable. I learn we move in spirals when we circle the drain of ourselves. I learn it all leads back to the ocean in the end.
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3/18: My pages open w/ the day - like they used to, like they used to. The sun is in the hallway, her slow illumination dance. I am nobody, but the small corners of the world rely on me - to find lost things and to make meaning, to clean up and clear up, to spin chaos into thread w/ hair and silk and dreams still dreaming.
Nothing in front of me now where I sit. Hot water gets hotter. The ants find their way inside. Something like 8:45 on a Monday, sent to me w/ hope. The world doesn't belong to anyone. We listen and love on park benches and walks all windy by the water, alone and never alone.
I'm sat at my kitchen table to meet the day w/ humility and what’s left of my coffee, a couple easy jobs to do. I read a newsletter by a writer halfway through her morning pages & remember there is still more to this practice than getting a fistful of words down. I didn't read the workbook, remember? I have to bend all the rules if I'm going to stick to anything.
I mirror the writer's sentiment about “self-help stuff” - the prodding assertions to do something good for yourself in the tone of someone else’s teacher, is it supposed to be so gentle? Is it supposed to be so general? What about those of us who are too comfortable giving ourselves experiences and excuses? Who feel no guilt prioritizing creativity or desire? Who know their no better than their yes? Those of us who actually get stuck there, in the wet of it, in the isolation of it? I guess that’s why I didn't read the Artists’ Way before getting started, on the search for freedom, not for nagging permission.
Let's go with it. I've been in a relationship with my creativity for a really long time. So long that any self-respecting person would have bailed because it has been so lopsided. I always promised I'd let her pick what we were going to do next, but there has always been some excuse. I always said I'd pay more attention once I did this or that thing, finished this course of study, or got that job. I am ashamed to admit I exploited my very best friend. Let her work and work and work all for other people just so I could pay my bills. Holy shit. Do you know what that makes me?
Sara Kaye of Hot Hot Boredom, I’ve Been Artist-Dating Myself For A While
Throughout this practice, Julia Cameron's words interrupt the flow of mine on the page. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. The ones I have read haven't given me anything I needed or never had before. I'll live in this house the way that works for me, the way I live anywhere. As a rule breaker, my creative practice has been a chance to thoughtfully and meaningfully break the rules - to take what works and leave what doesn't & to not think too much about it. I’m over 6 months into this practice and can say my relationship to my own creativity has changed, is changing still, a mirror of the relationship w/in myself.
I am working through discipline, not because it is fun but because it is a gift I can give myself. I am working through belief because it is the place I must write from, live from & measure my motivations from. I am working through my consistent inconsistency w/ grace. I know I am in this spiral somewhere. I know this practice is not about the art but the art of living.
In doubt, in greed, in laziness, I am alive and can find my way out. In fear fear fear, I am alive w/ the blood in my ears. And if I am here in my home full of dirt, my art is here too. Sometimes I carry it around and sometimes it carries me - between day job and cleaning gig and night work and passion project, appointments, ointments and backwash, through the grass, made of trash and in the end (all of us, all of us) only ash.
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3/19: I sit on the ground to write. I put the soft pillow Mallory has been sleeping on right here in the sun w/ me. She slept on it all night down here. I am jealous but really I am worried. I thought she was doing better but doubt is here again, taking sharp breaths out.
When I lay pillow to hardwood, she says, Hey! She gets up and looks all around, nose first. My girl leaves nothing unturned, let's nothing get in her way. At the vet, pried from the back of the carrier, nose first and all over. So beautiful, pretty girl they cooed. A confusion about the thyroid panel, processing here or sending it out? Um, Here, it was decided. Good, that will save me some money, they told me.
Mallory sits on the pillow now, in the sun in the sun like me. She helps herself to my glass of water and lays right down. I worship her. And at the vet, they said so pretty, beautiful girl - don’t know what could be going on w/ her about the fleas or not fleas, just little bumps and scabs, driving her crazy, could just be a skin thing, breeds can be sensitive. I knew it before they said it. The curse of sensitivity. I guess I always worried I’d had it too.
OK OK OK. Doc, I say, she’s not eating, makes herself sick every time, hair in her belly, you know.
I go home w/ sensitive and a phone call to wait on, like game show results, until next week. But we got here together, home I mean. I drove the precious things. We're sat here on the floor together. And River, boy prince, put on his crown and demanded, where?? We’re here now, boy. I called my mother & talked w/ my worries all up front. We moved through them together, got to OK. It's Tuesday, I am dressed for the weather.
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3/20: I’m here for the long stretch of Spring for the first time in years. It is a slide, the Earth less solid now. We squish and I wait. I will see Florida again in the fall, maybe it will feel less like a surprise and more like something I can save an exhale for. This year, so far, has felt only like holding, breath tight in my belly.
I could have slept for another hour, another couple of hours, home last night w/ midnight in sight. I am seeing how many times this week I can wear this vintage crewneck and how much time a day I need to write. I come up against time again, wanting it to pause while I hold the pen.
Yesterday was sobering even w/ the wine. I had mandarins for lunch and dinner, day job until close, poetry until end of night. I walked through to the one place I never go undetected, basement bar all red. My friend Hill was back from a two month adventure and all lit up, he saved the two-top in the corner for us, my original seat. My little corner, stage left. It was one of those straight-shot readings, off w/out a hitch, not so many people that time felt constrictive, no tension held too long. An open room. I like to trust that Lincoln's becomes what people need, fed by the energy - electric and bustling or calm and clear. How energy has weight. How where we go, the places we find have to try and contain us. This is how rooms change, how our homes get to know us.
I've been missing my poetry, the stuff I abandoned by accident when I gave myself permission to narrative and something like inner honesty. This new dedication to clarity isn’t always fun. When I wasn't so connected, poetry was made of sparks and fits. I've misplaced my own mystery. I miss my misfires, how they felt & how they sounded. I wanted to bring some of that back to our home stage but I also wanted to be here, to be Now, to be honest about where I've been and where I haven't. In a reach, I pulled entries from these pages and crafted lines I long abandoned. My five minutes up there w/ everyone else's. My corner more cramped than I remembered. And after, I got pulled into the orbit of my friends, my most willing surrender, to the bar w/ all the maps and a booth in the back.
Everyone ordered another! and I sipped water, shared a grilled cheese, a couple bites of Hill’s carrot cake, shuffled into the leather booth under all the Earths, flat on walls & ceiling. My friends and I talked love and trends and travels, all of us coming to the bar w/ our whole lives behind us and electric trajectories. Has everyone here been in love before? We could stay for days talking like this, another & another & another. Our hearts all beat at the same pace for love that changes us, love we have gone rabid for, love we believe in. The same pace w/ different experiences, different lessons, different desires, but love all the same.
We go out to sit w/ love and to reconcile w/ it. What do we do w/ this all consuming ether thing as it becomes something solid right in front of us? The strategies, the ways we understand it or don't understand it, the things we attach to and the things we detach from, where we saw it first - how eye contact becomes something we have to think about. Red says, we’re trying something new. Hill says, I've never met someone w/ the capacity to love like I do until now. MC says, being understood is the most important thing. Walt says, dominoes, motherfucker!
I found myself careful, my eyes alive like poker, my voice offered to the playful and inquisitive only. W/ love, I want to give it all away but my experiences, my lessons, my desires all convince me to keep it tight to my chest, under silver and fleece where my excitable heart beats. I kept my elbows on the table, my fingers kept themselves busy. It came down to napkins all crumbled and no chips left. My body knew Wednesday would be soon. My heart didn't like being talked about like it wasn't in the room.
I said something like what I've been writing - of experience and lessons and Desire - that through difference, we fall in love. I was thinking of the love of my life and our differences. I was thinking of all that my friends have taught me, shown me, freed me from. I was thinking of when I’ve swooned, surprising myself. I said difference, but I should have said uniqueness. Unique, the ways we are pulled in to someone. Unique, the ways we crave closeness. Unique, a smile or laugh or thoughtless gesture that stays w/ us. Unique, how we recognize love and give love and long for love. Unique, how it fits in our lives. Love makes everyone special. Love for everyone, flowing freely wherever it gets through. A beautiful, compulsive, consuming thing. I never want to be free of love. I never will be.
I am interrupting my favorite impulses, choosing some new patterns and hoping they are good for me, hoping they'll stick. And if they don't become part of me, I'm hoping they'll get me where I want to be. I've only been listening to the rock, the roll, the whammy, the long solo. I want to ask my friends, what dreams have you denied yourself? In youth, in youth, when you learned painfully your limits, when you learned, dizzyingly, your size?
I am still expecting myself to be an exception - my beliefs cut down at the knees, limiting the shape of me. Growing older is just choosing what to believe. I’ve been listening better and tripping over this. It is all so flimsy. Knowledge is somewhere to start and something to laugh at (when we think we have it, when we find something to stand on, the ground is under our feet, this we know). Belief is something to find and fall at the feet of (when we think we need it, when we find something to stand for / certainty is not knowledge, certainty is belief). I fuss over all of this because I’ve believed the life I want is off limits. How I am careful in the ways I love - friends, family, lovers, strangers. The way I refuse to pick up guitar or drums or piano, I lock my voice up behind this overheated head of mine. The way I have spent all my money, lost all my money, soured myself quickly. When I am on fire, I don't trust myself. I don't light up the world if I don't let go of control.
I believe I am 29. I believe I give myself too many excuses, afraid of letting myself down. I believe I am uncomfortable leaning into the curves. I believe I need to practice more - w/ my hands and my voice and my belief. T believes we are what we do but I believe we are what we dream. The ground is not under my feet, it is deep inside me. One day, it will be all around me.
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3/21: It snowed last night but I didn't know until I stepped outside, all that falls silent in the dark. It’s almost all melted away already but I won the bet. The sun dressed as Spring and my city, windy, dressed as hero, some kind of cape, some kind of ego. Just a dusting of white and the resilient pussy willows. I start counting crumbs and stop before I go full yellow wallpaper. Up early and now running late, I take my coffee on the road.
I hope to go out Friday night and catch the snow when it is blooming and blowing into Saturday. I hope to clean while Spring is in reverse, to make room for the whispers of rebirth. Maybe Mallory will feel better by then. I looked her in the eyes on the way to the vet, asking do you trust me? I have a hard time leaving her alone. At home, where she is again curled up into herself, she asks, do you trust me? We agree on this silent love, this trust w/ no room for anything else. Maybe I'll be able to write poetry again. I am thinking of Benjamine’s upside down copy of Spring & All - is mine like that too? No, but mine is blue. My friends, I trust you. The food my lover makes, the time it takes to touch in the morning, the years spent so close together - all trust. I go out into my world and convince myself, yes, I trust you too. The world takes what it needs. My trust unnecessary beyond the trust I put in myself, changing from solid to liquid like the ice outside.
A baby is born w/out a name and my family grows another inch up towards the sun. We all feel it, new life at the break of winter. A name chosen once breath is sure and practiced - spontaneous, meaning steward. We love immediately, as a family. We say, Welcome to the world! We love you! We trust you!
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3/22: The spotlight so bright, like the moon hanging low, and red velvet curtains all around. Everything in the theater is close to falling apart. I have been here before, when it was quieter. I have been naked under that spotlight, when it was in the studio. Last night, I was at the Nickelodeon for a local film festival, sitting in the center of the center in the light of the big screen. My friends helped put this thing on - 14 films made in 72 hours, a screening of them all back to back. Short films w/ keys and monsters and journeys, love and memory, misunderstandings and revenge and so much fun. Each film had to include the line of dialogue, I never said that.
I was early but nothing ever starts on time. Filmmakers all around. I listened in on some gray hairs while I waited for my friends to find me. I heard an introduction, or a reintroduction, had only met over Zoom. Didn't recognize you in 3D! Am I gonna see something good? One said. I looked around as the place started to fill up, all the seats flipped down and eyes rapt on the screen. I in denim and everyone else in suits and scarves and sequins. All dressed up to go to the movies.
I sit in the middle of the makers as a friend, desire on all the ends of me. I eat the popcorn before the movie starts. I sit in the center of the room in the center of my city. I want to be even closer. Friends who make things together. I feel all the art in my city as it hurriedly talks to itself, creates and is being created. So much of it saying, thank you thank you thank you.
In the movies, my friend the Rat was inducted into a cult. A cowboy learned how to cry and a locksmith let himself dance. I sat behind a crew of older women, the row reserved, their movie filmed on a phone: an abandoned summer town, animals who had their voices, quick jump edits and a cold plunge, rock ‘n’roll! Theirs was a favorite but I don't know if they believed me when I told them. On the other end of it, a film noir made w/ AI and voice dubbing - places and bodies morphing and melting like they do in dreams, Casablanca in space. All jazz, full frontal, untrustworthy poetry but beautiful. Life is long, said the femme fatale, changing eyes, changing painted lips. If it means something, it is lost on me, said loverboy.
We have stars in the room, right here in the red seats. They're big on the screen but small up close. Oh, I didn't recognize you in 3D, in the round, the whole shape of you before me! You're deeper now, something I can wade into. You’re right here. You did all this? I can see you now. I can see you now. I’m your biggest fan - my friends, my friends! I love being annoying in the audience, hooting and hollering. After the credits rolled and awards were given out, the makers begged to be known, begged to be helped, to be funded, begged to make their art w/out having to starve and struggle. They did it w/ hope, w/ suits, w/ work made regardless but yes, they begged.
Then it was all after-party. The wind kicked us cold and listened in on our conversations, jealous and lusting after our lives, lost to what happens on the inside. After-party at the arcade bar, up and around. I smoked my j fast and loose, wanting to keep hands in pockets, persuaded to stay out later than I planned. The Wizard in red, in brown. The Rat in black, in blue. I was biggest fan, heart to heart, the middleman, sought after in my own right. It wasn't my scene, but it was close enough, enough friends to feel known. I only said shit that I meant. I knew innately the tongues wrapped in glamor. In the way that I am untouchable. In the way that I am touchstone. Truth lives here w/ me - my friends know.
In the cold cold streets, we left our past hurt so we didn't carry it too far into our present. In the bathroom, we reconcile w/ disappointment, that very specific taste of it, no real blame. We know the trouble of finishing and distilling, of calling something complete and surrendering control. We know how voices and bodies get borrowed by art and we have no real say in how or what that means beyond ourselves. I held my friend close when they said, it doesn't feel like I wanted it to (like a poem I wrote, like a lot of poems I’ve written, heartbreaking thing). Oh, beautiful world of disillusionment! I drove home w/ Zeppelin. The stars outshine us all. The sun steals the day and I am sweating.
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3/23: Dog-Ear, free to read for now
A Night Bloom
3/23: Snowy after last call and a night unwound. This is where we learn about destruction. Someone is awake and howling for me, but I used to be a golden thing. Whose hands are these, shy and open and animal, like my fathers? In the breath of an eye roll I am out of the room. I am restless w/ a night tied around so many fingers.
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3/24: The house smells of bacon and I wear the clown sweater. T woke hot and boundless, out of covers out of sheets. His brother on his way, the mountains calling. My city reflected in the sky, the sky blue and black like the Rat the other night, star of the show. Something like six inches of snow, uncertain crunch and crumble. Trees shot down, power lines too, ice on everything. All that was growing, eager eager, choked by ice. The green sleeps in the brown. The train rode on through the night, no one at the helm. I knew the ice would return to remind us of precious things, crystals and hitched breath, like afraid of falling too fast. All of us in ice, in ice, no, not ice in glass, precious glass, ready to break & unafraid.
I was out of sorts yesterday, all tired in myself, of myself, this body and it's lightning, the wick that won't hold the flame, empty barrel of a gun at the card table. I am empty threats and a joyful loser, the Fool forgetting it all behind or trying to see how far I can go w/out. The sky opens up and I can't choose a portal, none are all mine. There is ice all over, a crunch, a slip under my wheels and I'm just trying to get to work, to write some lousy poetry, to sit next to my lover for dinner, to love w/ all of me honestly, as an attached thing in the lie of Spring.
Unattached, I am dropped in the snow, sad to wait but stuck. When someone comes along, warm enough to melt, I say, you should try this, lay down right here next to me. I say, there is a sky all lit up for us, there is serenity in the ice. I wait where there roots wait, down here in the dirt, filthy so no one wants me. I wait for the sun to turn me green like forgotten seeds in the throat of the Earth. New life, spit and sperm, spiraling up to the sun. My body knows something I don't. The feelings of things, a whole language lost to time. We are an age of language, of communication, of Truth however serpentine.
I've been staying quiet and it's unlike me - these restless feet, these reaching hands, this body open open to the world below the moon. Do you suffer it? The secrets our bodies keep from us? The rules we set, always trying to tell the body what to do and how to feel. In a sharp moment of pleasure the body says, you don't control me, I am you. I am water. I am dirt. I am spinning out and dropped all over, changing in your hands as you change in mine. My eyes wide and open to the sky, I say, Do you see me, world? Do you only see my body? I am belly up in surrender. I am malleable. Touch and see what happens.
It is the snow and then the rains, the sun more and more. I see what I am shown and still, so narrow - head stuck in mud, looking only forward. My context is convex. My body is listening. The sun sends me warmth, unobstructed light, bodies like mine close by. I am not worried about keeping myself warm, I will not lose that part of me. There are things I know but can't give away, even to myself. I watch and I feel things, I smoke and I joke and I steal things, I wait for the world to unveil. Even friends don't always hear me clearly - if they hear nothing but all love I will still be rooted in.
Today, all ice, all glass, the sun shines through mirrors and I dream through possibility. Somewhere behind me are the bad habits I inherited and somewhere in the future, a friend is holding my hand.
My body knows something I don't. It will never find the language to tell me. Earth communes w/ Earth, blood in the dirt. I forget myself and find freedom. I am growing beyond where I have fallen. The roots of me dance in the dirt, turning touch into food and sunshine into love, enough to live on.
This entry is a part of my Nightmares & Morning Pages series, where I write every day and share the good stuff. Subscribe to keep up with me & share what you like (please).
My messages & chat are open for inspired journal prompts or anyone who wants to pick apart the world with me. Catch you on the next go around 𖦹
G