A Small Nothing Comes & Sits below The Moon
A Small Nothing Comes & Sits below The Moon
September 13 - September 24 / Nightmares & Morning pages
9/13: It is a golden day in September. The red berries in bunches in the tree. The spider starts in the center, weaves and returns to center, spirals all the way around connecting discordant threads. I have been making connections myself, spiraling around like this, enjoying the breeze that rattles silk and crawling to center where everything is held.
That’s where I am now - on my chair, on my porch, writing again like I’ve been avoiding - or not avoiding but not prioritizing. So much meaning and importance stacked up in the felt world that sitting to write has felt like overworking a muscle. In September now, I let the muscles heal. I dance when it feels good. I stretch and smoke before I write, getting outside while I can. The hum of life keeps me company. My thoughts again become a floating thing, unmoored and babbling.
A time of cleansing became a time of waiting, waiting into wanting until wanting became volcanic. The landscape black and molten where the strangest flowers bloomed. Meaning, this summer, something erupted but not what I expected. The way I worry about being loved through it all - everything coming down and I’m distracted w/ questions not of love but lovability. The Last August left me but love did not.
This summer began w/ claw marks in the dirt, my soul soaking up the summer through my pores between jobs. I was preparing for exile, you know, how adventures begin, how we learn quickly and deeply about ourselves. I learn about myself the way I learn about everything - the slow way, the hard way, the risky, antiquated and true way. I think of Wizard hands covered in ink and burns and paper cuts, picking and plucking and digging. While we can still recognize the beginning for what it is, let us pack our sacks and leave scraps of us around the city. The thinnest of paper like feathers, like dreams on the air.
On our long walks around ourselves, wizards capitulate w/ the moon like we have always done., before we were we, before the world was endlessly wide. Our greatest adventure is here in our city where we know the consistency of love like we know the side streets and one ways - yes, we still take wrong turns. All this time learning to trust the street signs, never wanting to turn around, rather circling around and around. Our journey is cobblestones underfoot in the coastal city before she crumbles.
Here, we look how we have always looked, long hair and holes in our shoes, someone else’s blood stained on dark denim and toothy smiles like big cats in a wet jungle. My lover taught me to lean into the curves on the motorcycle. The Wizard taught me that, too, to lean into where the magic is. This community, this city, this sea taught me everything everything everything comes back around. I am alive on a moving thing, feeling it out w/out looking at the ground. I am the Fool eternal, walking the same streets as if they were something new. I pick up a feather and I put up a flier and I see my friends around each corner.
Now, I am listening to It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry. I’m thinking about sitting in this driver’s seat w/ GH in the passenger seat. The sun had gone down and the mob unleashed. Remember picking up our pace to cut through to the car. Remember laughing as this song was playing, as the one road out became flooded, a funnel of Time, a current racing back towards the city, tugging Portland’s hair in all kinds of directions. Just funny, the swarms of summer.
The other night when GH was in town sleeping in the G room w/ all the dead animals (bat and snake and cow and goat and minx and whatever the spiders leave behind) and the moon swam around the island. We talked about sex clubs and sacrifice and living a long, long time.
I still smell this summer in my armpits. I realize sacrifice means something different to me now, or it moves differently. It’s matured. It is not about stopping the heart but letting it roast. Sacrifice requires a diligent integration of the thing. It’s about the feast and waiting until it’s ready and no sooner. I don’t have to sit at the altar of Desire, blood stained as it is, untrusting of the God that put me here, no, my gods are earthen and changing all the time.
Too much awareness will kill ya and not enough makes you sick. I pull the joker yet again, getting to know the edges of my illusions. I am the Fool card in the breeze like Saint Lazlo taught me, teetering on unseen cliff and perpetually getting started, perpetually taking first steps. I am at home on well-trodden ground, a history dug deep to get us here. The poets, the hopeless, the city - muddy like my heart is muddy. I am all my beginnings at once and made of clay so wet it could never hope to hold itself up. Impressionable and alive in every step.
It is a golden day in September. The red berries in bunches smashed and oozing under tires and into the concrete. The spider worships the sun and I become fearful. I am tickled by a wish in the air, hair tickling my nose. I laugh and I become capable, dressed as a carnival and falling into your hands, as everything you could have every dreamed of.
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9/14: Tonight, we change. A friend chooses the desert over the shore and we go out, stay out, feel out the night until the Doctor gets too tired to stay up w/ us. The sunset was so slow, as if she was giving us more time together. The Doctor w/ a string of pom poms around her neck and a basket of little gifts she wasn’t expecting. The Wheel of Fortune card sticking out between her wallet and a bouquet of flowers. Oh no, I should know what a forever goodbye feels like by now but I don’t, I don’t, I refuse to let that kind of forever win. Until the sun sets only for me, will I still be staying, see you soon. And even then, even then.
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9/16: A small nothing comes and sits below the moon. It is Monday, clear skies, electric blue and something taking root. All at once, I am somewhere entirely familiar and feeling new. I am again dreaming of schools. I again pull the Fool, like the card I gave the Doctor before she left. I hold this red book and write for the 300th time: nothing has changed except me. I smoke at the end of my shift. My lover and I clear out all the cabinets. It is Monday night and I let the insects sing.
This week, I am half-ether. I love what is directly in front of me. Thinking about all the things I can’t touch…it’s enough to tear reality away. Sometimes I can only tolerate what I can hold in my hand, can flex and feel, something else I have written endlessly of. So often I am in a dream trying to be an earthly thing.
Sunday, distracted, I yanked on silver, broke my chain, caught the pendants in my hand - A mano cornuto like Nana Angie and a middle finger I've worn for years. The former, a gift through time and the latter, from my first week in my city. Feels strange without it, my fingers twitch.
Across realities, Nana Angie is in the kitchen. She's stirring something diligently on the stove. At the same time, a spider weaves her imperfect web. At the same time, I spiral in and out and deeper into the crumbling, tangible Now. I live in the echo of my family, of their joy and their unknowing, can feel them all the time. They react to my life now in tugs and trips, lassoes around my heart like the neck of a wild horse, emotions that grip. We are freer and freer things. I am freer and freer still. They watch me barefoot on stage and see a ferocity that could only be familial.
We are a family of loud mouths but sometimes my secrets feel like home. Here is my greatest secret. I snapped this chain once before and once before, Nana Angie's pendant was lost to the dirt. I was in the swamps with a new friend, a photographer in the tall grasses, dropping polaroids like eggs. Absent-mindedly I caught the chain and it split. Nana Angie had worn this talisman for decades and now, it was swallowed. I dug through pine needles and dirt to no avail, giving up too quickly, racing the sun. I bought a new one on the drive home. Told no one. I was trying new things back then and I thought I needed protection. I'm trying new things now and I wonder what I was so afraid of. I wonder how much protection one really needs.
I think about what else has kept me safe - silence and the space between. Where I go when I am thirsty and lost, soaking it all up. Silence seeps in the blood like air bubbles, floating to the surface of love where it is safe but not for long. My words are transformed waste, smoothed with love and let loose with a bite. An oyster rolling a pearl in its mouth. Like a clam, my mouth slams shut. Silence becomes an experiment.
This summer, someone who once loved me asked if I prefer honesty or loyalty. I replied honesty without thinking. I'm remembering that now, I remember saying, You can be loyal for all kinds of reasons. For honesty, only one. I stretch my jaw in the dark. A cat yawns and lengthens her spine in the heat. Silver burrows into the dirt and nothing grows. I am freer, freer still.
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9/17: Winking moon in the day time, do you see me here, sat in my city w/ a breakfast sandwich? Ohno closing its doors in a month but right now, African guitars play too loud to the dirty blue and white checker floor. In the window, a tin foil world. An aluminum cowboy on an aluminum horse. Aluminum Snake in the grass. Aluminum roses and stars and swans. Metallic glasses half full and crinkled sails facing the sea breeze and a little aluminum bicycle. I think of taking the bike for my mom - remembering her obsession w/ the spindly things and tripping over spokes in the Florida heat. I leave it where it belongs for as long as it belongs.
Regulars swing through. The rusting bells twinkle on the door. Customer mugs and postcards and Ohno’s first dollar framed on the shelf next to the stove. English muffins and bagels lined up over fire. The coolers are filled and the shelves in the back slope from the weight of wine bottles and whatever came before. The owner grins in an apron between flips, watching Tuesday unfold like any other. Time drags like an aluminum snail w/ its spiral shell, slowly and ad infinitum. One of the last shipments of onions and gloves until the lock goes on the door and the sign comes down. A #3 carefully wrapped in wax paper for the customer who lives down the street and who has been coming through every morning since they announced their closing. Someone asks for the recipe for their potato salad and it’s what you’d expect to be in potato salad but it’s special because it’s made here.
I am quiet in the mornings while Malian music plays easy, now. In this silence, I am integrated. Neighbors on Brackett St. wave at the shop, not at me, but I smile back on behalf of the brick, the vines, the tin foil world. I roll the Future in my mouth, tonguing hopeful possibility like a missing tooth. My words are safe transformed waste. And look! An aluminum oyster w/ a tiny aluminum pearl! Malleable monuments sitting in a windowsill for now, for now. Nothing is forever in this city, in any city. We have no monuments, really. We only have the sea.
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9/18: I am sliced between my day like cold cuts between white bread. I am home after work & work & work and still in the driver’s seat. I would consider myself alone now, stealing time to write, to swirl myself around the glass and watch the ice melt.
Last night was the toasted brown color of my mother’s eyes, of my eyes, of brunettes like us, brunette like a Calabrese horse. We smiled simply from being close, nothing else mattered as much as it did before when we quiet a few states away. You look at the moon last night and see that the eclipse is only evident as a looming shadow over the shoulder of the moon, like devil horns in silhouette. The joker is in the sky now and I admit, I’m happy to be alive. This life unravels itself just when I think I can’t work out the knots; not w/ fingers, not w/ teeth. Teeth & lips & the ways they keep parts of me inside myself, the ways I slip out anyway.
It is a beautiful thing to be known in this capacity. All the ways I am known are just as precious as the ways I am not. The moon looks a little green from down here, reflecting us back at ourselves. A Veridian September. Worlds collided last night in the red room. The poets, the girlies, my family triangulate around me and I am, oddly at the center of something, watching my hands work and keeping myself honest. This electric thing, it gathered itself on Market St. The Wizard & I folded our newsprint on bar tops before making our way down the street. My mom and her big camera, my aunt her twin sister, and me, her twin daughter who stops calling sometimes. My mother, alive in all of it. Excited and impressed and never more than an arms’ length away.
Benjamine watches my mother and I playing w/ our rings absentmindedly in unison, spinning silver. Magic, they call it. Restlessness, I call it. J said she knew who my mother was by the fat cig between her lips between doorways. Red gushed to my mother, called me Baby G, and my mom did a little dance. The three of us sat at the high top in good company. Everything in an unusual place yesterday.
Curse breaker night, where it all shatters towards freedom and we help clean up the glass. Mc hosting again while Beer Money was away. I read during the first act rather than the second in case my family had to sneak out early. The Autumn Breeze rolled in and read about loss. Rain, sweet rain on stage and a full room to hear and hold. Benjamine wrote to their childhood hero, Dumbo, up in the sky somehow. Liv read about New Orleans. Walt dropped in again. J commanded the stage, the powerful thunder of a Retired Cool Girl. Ivy watching her world and telling us about it like a sturdy tree in a prophesied storm, she’s back in town for a while. The Owl adjusted the mic and sat on the couch, where we first saw her w/out knowing it was her, on the waitlist & blowing the room away. Her first piece began, I want to see queer people live to 100 and her second piece, A Haiku for Scooping Cat Litter. I wrestle w/ a silence born to me, a sadness once turned to before anything else. Now, I trust that the people in my life are meant to be here.
My mother, my aunt, staying after intermission and helping us all light up in the alley. They stayed to hear J’s poem and then scooted me into the hall to hug close into forever. I love to see them here in Portland. Suddenly, it was so easy. A love too familiar here in my city below the smudged moon. Last night, I felt into every mold of myself, alert and intentional, trying to be. I worried how you do when you love something, when you start to see it all flicker in the broken glass, a reality you forgot was there.
These days, I try to stick w/ joy even when I’m tired and fidgeting w/ my rings, sounding too interested, being known by too many people while I let myself do what I love to do. My family left the city last night and I smoked too much. I stretched my feet out on the now-empty chair where my mother sat and felt into the room, digesting a buzz that was only partially my own.
The moon passed over the sun and I was rocked, wandering towards the sea. When the poetry found an ending, we filtered out fast. The Wizard across from me and the Rabbit right next. Red across from MC, J across from Al, a slanting picnic table of bar food like having dinner on an unsteady ship, chowder almost spilling from the tilt. I start sentences and take too long to finish, lose myself in the point, sit w/ my friends seeing how September sounds. This is where I see those horned shadows on the moon. The Wizard smirks, seeing them too.
I woke up today grabbing the green thing by the throat, the ego thing I think my ego is green, not of envy but of earth. I think my ego is phallic and sad and slimy. I think its taken the sorrows of my family and soaked them in glue - paper mache horse in process in the corner. I think my ego learned to shapeshift first, first learned to play, first played dress-up, first changed its name and face and how it moved inside my gut - kicked out safety, kicked out intuition, kicking me awake with shame in the night. I am happier when my ego has bite marks on it.
The moon sits on the lap of the sun and my ego lays down in the grass like an old dog, closing its tired eyes. What once felt like self-doubt reveals itself as gravity, as reality, as top soil. I am only exactly where I am & while the green ego thing isn’t looking, the glass is wiped clean. Sparkling.
Sometimes I sit, only listening. Sometimes I am too many things at once. The rain fills rivers and easy love fills pitchers and I take only as much as collects on my web, the glory that find me when I am squealing & unworthy. My ego doesn’t need to be invited, it arrives w/ expectations. W/out it, I only go where I know I am wanted. So tonight, I go home where an amateur blues cover of Hey Joe echoes from my living room and teases the neighborhood, my lover and his friends, amps crowded over a shedding wool rug and me, listening here in the black
A part of me left happy in last night, I remember now as the crickets sing the blues. Tonight, the boys are making music in the living room and I’m out for the night, stealing more time in the driveway. Finding time to write has felt futile these days, a full circle that swallows me.
There is enough love in this world to turn the ego into artist again, to turn self-doubt into a seed again, to call me home regardless of how I am known and not know. My mother’s love is always w/in arm length from me, the blood the runs as it has always run, down the mountains of time and ending w/ me. My city wide open and gaping like baby birds chirping up at the moon.
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9/19: Touch always says, I’m here, I’m really here.
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9/20: This morning, the world is wet and a little more alive. Peepers in the garden. Crows uniting with sky. My cats are attentive on their side of the window. Droplets suspended in time in the sculpture garden. A bronze torso, a miniature giant, a satyr who plays the drums. In the all wet neighboring town, my love and I drive with his mother to hear the artists talk about having fun and getting older & older. Art is made and we get older & older.
While no one is looking, everything on earth leans into itself. Age makes it mean something, or nothing, or that's the secret we're always looking for. Everything and nothing weighing the same at the end of every red night and in the mornings, wet birth of everything, of nothing, swallowed with breakfast, with bread with coffee with pills.
Mornings and evenings are cold now. Everything and nothing with their holes from use, from wear, from mindless relentless loving. I paw through the artist's notebook. Spirals and metallic explosions of color, contained and called doodles. Reminiscent of the series on the walls of the gallery but not nearly as layered, not nearly as doted over. The maturation of art, getting funky. Between pages, black ink drawings of faces, of friends, practicing bodies and reference drawing. Something, the artist says, that I've never been good at. But I see the faces clearly, names scratched nearby, next to dreams and schemes, messages of hope and shit to cross off once it's all done. Notes like contract with god and just a body and scared of dying. The notebook is passed around the room again.
The artist whose notebook it is, who we are here to see, used to live in Hometown NH. She watched T and his brother grow up. She hugged his mother so tight when she saw her. I wandered the small gallery as it expanded, overhearing a dappled conversation about flow state. I hear Merrill say, I've been kind of obsessed with....cave art. My ears perk up, the simplicity, the symbolism, most of all the synchronicity. I hear her say, I never use brown but I'm using this raw brown color lately... We plan to spend a Sunday soon talking only about brown.
The older gentleman running the gallery pulls a key from his vest and unlocks the door to the sculpture garden just for me and T. We lead phone light first and take the small path around. The rain has stopped, wet clings to all the art. The entire time, T is telling me, Don't touch anything. Don't! but outside I am free. Anything made to withstand the weather can withstand these hands. A handshake of wire. Blessings on the forehead. Disturbing a spider web between smooth, metal ass cheeks. It's wet but we feel no rain. This morning too, wet and overcast but nothing falling from the sky. I am doodling my way into the future. A little here, a little there, wearing brown and staying dirty, holes in all my favorite things to let the breeze through.
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9/21: Fire catches quickly in the valley. We are slung below the green as she turns yellow, turns orange, all along Gulf Hagas. It’s still summer when we arrive and when we leave tomorrow, it will be Autumn. My lover and I learn from the world and find balance, find our footing, first on the road and then in the dirt, walking the long way around the canyon like we walked around the neighborhood when we moved in, like we walked after every wedding over the last few years. It is all farmlands and auto body shops on the way up. The Tacoma already smells of mud. The wind whistles between the hood of the truck and the camper where we will sleep tonight.
We ride the long drive of our lives together laying black next to white and swimming in the middle of Time. My body gears up to turn red, aching aching, and his achilles tendons are stiff, stiff. We climb around the edge and walk towards rushing water, waterfalls toppling into each other off of huge flat sheets of rock. Within the first fifteen minutes, I fell while we crossed the Pleasant River. I slipped my feet towards the lowest points and still lost balance, algae blooms on all the small rocks and slipping silly. I was all soaked just before the sun shone. She followed us beyond the trees. I took off pants and socks and laid them on a rock to dry until dry enough. I walked wet along the ridge, kicking rocks gone blue from when the ocean was here.
We plan to come back in the summer, when we can jump into the cracks between canyons and trust the mountain water for a while. My pants dry and my lover waits and the red leaves shock in the spots of sunlight. We look for the blue trail markers. I stare forever at roots yanked from the Earth. Uproot the tree and you’ll see how tightly the world really holds on.
My lover and I use a lot of salt and butter. We communicate best on adventures, going in together and coming out together. We sit by the fire as the day and night lean in at once, nose to nose, coy and comfortable. In the unreachable woods, the animals of us perk up.
We are alive in a sensual world. Wet to dry, cold to warm, calm to strange and right next to each other, right next to each other on the edge of something and at the swell of harvest season. Life hangs low for the taking, plump and red, juicy w/ promise. Crickets along the river seeing who is listening. Bats swooping overhead. A beaver in the water across the way pulling a tree down w/ it. Creatures working to live, alive w/ us. Our bellies full in the wilderness. Teeth nash on wood, we hear it across the way, the steady rhythmic thumping, thick bone on thicker bark. Soon, the young hemlock falls and we will hear the rustling leaves, the thwacking branches, as the beaver makes its way back to the water where we first heard it. All night like this and the night steals another Saturday.
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9/23: Eco grief, eco loss, eco losing eco hope, eco v. ego, egoic knowing the eco end, end of eco trust eco depth eco savior savior eco savor the eco fruits of eco ego labor, all the labor, laborious end justifies laborious means, meaning we will not see the eco at the end, will not hear the eco cries, will not understand the ego at the crossroads where there is no room for it any longer. Any longer and nothing eco left, the eco has left, the eco is right to leave, we left no room for it, we left no love for it, ego understands not eco love. Ego is the thief in us. Eco is the outlaw of the world.
Eco grief, eco loss, eco losing eco breath, I am running out, we are running out, eco running on fumes ego running on the rest, while we rest, we relearn rest, ego opposite rest but eco the birthplace, the cradle, the incubator of life. We are running out, we are outrunning, ego hits eco wall that eco erects - glaciers and their ancient microbes, biomes with their doors locked, the bones of our dead piled and unionized against ego. Savior, saviors, killer, killers, see how we run - see how we run out, see how we stockpile and spend, squander and search, see how we ego cry and eco scry and simply watch the clock keep time.
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9/24: The Workshop Podcast, Pt X
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).
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