Ad Occhi Chiusi

June 8 - June 13 / Nightmares & Morning Pages

6/8: In the birthplace of green dreams. Hometown NH, juicy w/ life. Sunstruck on a Saturday and on the road by 5:55 this morning. Black truck, camping hammock, pollen, packed bag. T and I used to make this drive every weekend back to where we started and back again. That was when my city wasn't talking to me, when the future still looked like the past and our friends were expecting us. We arrive at the Log House at the Edwin Twaste Estates - just a funny name T’s dad gave his property when the house was built and he was young, when his friends and bandmates played right in the open living room and slept on the floor. 

Now, the Log House is rotting fruit, a compact layer of dust over all and the sunlight streaming through. Green, green up to your knees. T is all steel toe boots and machine whirring, cutting wood for his father. The Log House is kept warm only by an All Nighter wood stove in the center of the house, cornflower blue and charcoal smudged cream, a pot of water always ready to boil so the air doesn't get too dry.

Edwin Twaste Estates, Hometown NH

Here, I am hiding and hoping, Hometown covering me. I am beneath evergreens by the poisoned lake, glittering all the same. I am what youth made me, small town obscure and slow to change. The ants eat the Log House and the trees grow freely up, up ceaseless and wild towards the stars where they shine bright and dead overhead.

These crooked circles I drive, an hour south and rewind. The pollen is getting to me. Nothing moves in this house except shadows. Nothing has moved here since T was growing, faster than the potatoes his father grows in the yard. There is work to be done, logs to cut and stack. I ruin the roll, I ruin the film. Pikachu on his old purple plastic camera and a walk, shorter than I remember. Bullets spent out back that made me uneasy, bareback in the summer. Sometimes being back here makes me uneasy. 

The wood stove retired for the season and the maple taps are packed up. We have friends that will drop by but they don’t stay as long as they used to. I worry about them as they float. I worry about this town as it gets smaller. This property his father owns, we’ll have to clean it out at the end of something. Nothing moves in this house except shadows.

Dust on T’s face in photos and between window panes, dust on books and bibles and John Lennon in the corner, on all of the guitars out of reach, on nebulous clay vases T and his brother shaped, colors that make sense to children. I think of this house often. What has been preserved here will outlive us. Skylights T and I sweat under as we were learning to love. The imprints of music his parents played in the basement make my ears ring if I stay too long. Friends leave messages, hope you’re doing alright, Gunnar. Stale beer in the floorboards. Porcelain dolphin nightlight that I stared at for hours. Hours and hours, something like freshman in college tripping on acid while the band reunited. The colors still swirl inside this house. 

I can’t believe it. I missed the entrance. Too many trees unaccounted for now. Too many rotations in the green, in the saw mill, flattened. The radio used to go right here.

Then / Now

Even the Earth laughs. A metaphor involving a violent cartoon and a laugh track. Even the Earth is stubborn, like his father and the surplus of non-perishables. I had been tripping in this bathroom for hours, staring at this porcelain dolphin as it changed colors and I was on the precipice of learning something. Disillusionment or something disguised. The crooked top floor and reverb, I can hear her, just barely. Aged and dizzy, Earth is the music and she’s getting quieter.

I swing now where my money stills and where fish fuck and where my lover grew up twenty minutes from where I grew up. Where wildflowers foam from spittlebugs like toothpaste still in the sink, like algal blooms amassing in the surf. Where overgrown grasses brush past knees and peek up skirts. Where my heart soared and broke and soared and broke. I remember bathtub and pick-up and pork chop, fireworks that turned the lake water purple and pollen that turned it yellow, tie dye and bath tub bonfires and looping late night drives. Homemade life, aching hands, aching back. My dreams once took up the whole sky.

I swing now and it is room temperature out here in the yard. I'm revising my idea of immortality. Pithy and tender legacies. My dreams went into the earth, into the heart of me, into what's holding me. Dreams tactile, textured, dreams w/ a pot of water close by, always ready to boil to keep them moist, like that.

I don't know anything really about plants but I know they all grow individually. I know they all need the same things in unique capacities. I know they all grow reaching up for the sun. Environment. Community. Time. Temperature. How the green things grow and are carried, grow and are carried. How the earth changes to hold them.

I'm thinking about mutations, no good, no bad, no using the word progress. I'm thinking waterfall like generating love to drink from. I'm thinking of the many ways we all need watering, need ground beneath our feet w/ less plastic and less hard black concrete. I believe life is long. I believe life is short. Between here and everywhere, it has all been continuation and change. How a child is born feeling and becomes a mimic and how all the parts of us are true. I am my mother in many ways, and father, sister, aunts, uncle, and I am a unique thing all on my own. I am where I come from and what the world has turned me into, all legacy could hope to be / irreverent mini-me, the art we make to tell our stories, some poets and some music, a simple masterpiece by the sea.

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6/9: Eyes closed and feet kicking stars, I am not yet weightless though I am losing. I am not yet insane though I've been flying. I am covering my eyes while the sax echoes through time. On the back of the motorcycle, in the room w/ music, on stage w/ eyes on me, my eyes close. I am half real and pushing forward.

A week ago, MC gave me an old poster she outgrew, a print of Picasso. I had left it at the bar but they had it rolled up in the back while I was spiraling, late night w/ French songs in my ear. It's displayed now in my living room next to another poster bought from another friend; a couple on a motorcycle, a blindfold, the phrase ad occhi chiusi. I’m spilling out of my shirt, out of myself, red as my walls are red. I'm musing if that's the best way to live a life, w/ eyes closed.

Thank you Bean / Thank you MC

We were weeds among weeds. We were Hometown, NH. My lover and I setting up a tent on old soil, sleeping in old selves. We were copper wires fraying, cutting in and out. I return to what once was home and I defeat myself again. My childhood bedroom doesn't exist anymore. I come to this side of town where I feel small, where I am silt, where it is all green. We could drive those backroads w/ eyes closed, have done it before. Winding unwinding. Kids again and it is dark but our bodies know the way. My lover calls this freedom, knowing something so well after knowing it so long.

Yesterday, I was w/ some of my oldest friends in the Cabin by the lake. I glitched and I listened. The very last flowers bloomed in the rain, rain soft and tentative all day. In this Cabin, trickster sprites and tequila shots and the hysterics of youth. We learn to love in weird, wonderful ways. Me and the boys and their boyfriends, wives, dogs, babies. I roll up on the soaking wet porch and watch the late blooms clumsily turn white, turn yellow, bleary like waking from a nap into life, like me, like no going back. Rainbow overhead but out of sight.

I felt something warm whispering up my back. Flame finding vintage fleece, my favorite crewneck w/ a hot new hole in the back. Flame slapped out quick. The warmth felt good at first. I am on fire and then I am giddy w/ friends and then I am sat around a fire pit listening to our whole lives again.

Babies bloom in my friends’ bellies. I am in the bathroom of the Cabin pulling two tampons from inside myself. I am laughing - hysterical, incredulous, relieved. When I was pink turning red, my mother told me an aunt had once put two tampons in w/out realizing. I remember being horrified, in youth it seemed impossible. The thought alone used to make me squirm and clench back when I felt so precious about this unchained part of me. At 29, I still surprise myself. This body resilient and me, still careless to some degree. God, it was funny. When I tugged the tails of the rat king, do you wanna know what I heard? You can do hard things, can do impossible things. I laughed into the night.

I'm thinking of: little hands, little feet, little pieces of you and me. Kicking, shifting, digging shoulder into guts and pelvis. I've seen the body do miraculous things. I hold my breath w/ hope for the babies. I don't promise anything. I hope and I listen. I pray the world stays green. Not everything is for me (I know, I know deeply) and yet I am here w/ love to share. I am here for my friends and what they make, for my family as it grows and grows, for what this world becomes when new eyes open and the mess trickles down through new generations.

And today, today, working seaside for SPACE while children danced and played, lo-fi and tactile. Today I saw a new part of my city, tingling on her toes, water under the docks. The children and the people who love them. We all had the same kinda looks on our faces, hope and fear and exhaustion, holding our breath high in our lungs. No money for the arts. No money for the kids. No money to be made for the life I wanna live.

I sat in the woods w/ my friends like Magnolia stubborn at the top of the bush, peeking out for a sip of rain but holding close, petals over pistils, knees up to chest, someone else's petals over my eyes. Maybe not Magnolia, maybe a different vine altogether. I am not late, I am living different. Desire takes me in different directions and in a rare sighting, my values are here, hand in hand.

And (and and and) I was crying before I even woke up today. The drops of rain plump in the morning and hard on the shell of the tent. Rain falling hard on windshield lulling T to sleep on the same long road home, eyes closed and teetering between dreams. Two hands held between us, keeping him awake and keeping me quiet company.

I write and I zoom in & out on my vulnerabilities. There is a lot I don't know but I am a worshiper of choice. I make choices and I make sure to mourn what gets left behind, the colors life could be, the way I think it all should feel. I take some things away from myself and I shuffle the deck. I commit to the unconventional, fearless in the face of unfulfillment. Letting sadness in, letting acceptance follow. I weep for this world of poisoned possibility. I close my eyes and move forward.

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6/10: In my city celebrating nothing as the sky shuffled indecisive, Simpsons blue beyond the clouds. I stuff my face, late lunch or early dinner, and I imagine solid things. Diamonds and steel and stones sitting still in a stream redirecting water, like just go around me. I sit now where the Wizard and I sat. I am filthy and forgiving, dressed all in red. Red like poppies. Red like Fuji apples. Red like enamel left in the Southern sun. I do not feast but I am full. The Wizard sent me Dickinson's The Luxury to Apprehend but I am waiting for a text back about tonight. We are supposed to meet at a gallery, digging sound digging vision. 

I sat over my writing desk last night trying not to look in the mirror, eschewing my too simple words and easy depravity. To be wild and feel free, to recognize the difference - choice of words and order, exacerbate to chaos and back again. Relearn the waste in the body and expel, an attempt at cleanliness and reparation. White blood cells squeezed from the marrow. The imbalance of the world is something we learn internally first. How we feel hunger and exhaustion, frustration, disappointment, hopelessness, indifference. How we come to understand addiction. How we learn and relearn love. T orders me probiotics off the internet. I fall asleep in pasties and feel my body temperature regulate. I hold neon in my body. The fluorescence of the bile and burn in my throat. A beautiful yellow but hard to look at. Life lived when I wasn't looking and what a beautiful thing it's turned out to be. I don't feel like I'm missing, just living wide and loving deep.

Circa - circular motion. I knew this would happen because it keeps happening. A storm breaks the heat on one side of the country, dark in the mornings again and I am adding up copays. This will be a time and a time again to follow it. The lessons seem bigger now, bigger than we can carry for sure. Circa - this morning, where I have decided I am finished. Either never gravid, or always.

The future holds little weight for me because it is only mine. I will hold on to love and I will still panic. I will let things come into me and leave changed. I will not allow this body to produce anything but my own breath and protein, a stress fracture and fingernails, enough for one person to live with, only one person. I will not live to see myself multiplied, ancestry unhealed, body unprepared, not strong enough. I will make mistakes that will not matter, will pass none of this embryonically, will not watch a thing die besides myself. I imagine the end of this life to be lonely and the lessons all my own.

Not the steam engine, not the clock, but the human body, original machine. Female body has given me all the love in the world and this war with my placenta - I see the red recording light. It has given me grief, baby, ancient grief. You’re welcome. The end.

The music of body politics - clanging pots and pans and a flatline, nipples sucked raw in a formula shortage and bodies. Women don’t have heroes, they only have each other.

In the shower, I create the world from my hair, the soaked strands that I pull out. You see, I’ve been practicing chaos like I said and it always starts like this. All the different routes around. Always starts with play, with pleasure, without thought, with whole wonder, I wonder - what will I do with it now? This world created by mistake, not aborted but abandoned.

The shape of my life is changing, is all I mean to say. In ways I am nervous to anticipate. An empty womb promising more emptiness, a life that is mine that remains mine. A new thing not all that new. A beautiful noisy thing that belongs entirely to me.

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6/11: There are birds on trees and roof or at least a recording of birds, a recording of rain drying on the roads and cars rushing past, quiet and then all at once. A recording of head on pillow side to side and sheets around hips and knees, purring under chin and right next to my ear breathing, a recording I know as my own. The soundscape of morning. Cooing doves in my neighborhood and a spider in here that knows when I am looking at it.

Today I am nothing but the sound and shape of me, wanting to be held like this, looking for walls to bounce off of and become ambient. I am the buzzing insects of me. I am nothing in my neighborhood except another inhale, another exhale, another car on the road. It's Tuesday? Tuesday, lazy and resilient. Yesterday I pulled my words like kicking rocks, pebbles in driveways and boulders strong, unmoved, unbroken. Last night I went somewhere new and became wind under the stone that blew.

I sit striped facing a dead end. My notebook is stuffed. I am carrying part of me that I don't know where to put down. Last night, I sat in my mystery again. All red in the worst seat in the house - I was new here, still spying, suddenly in contact w/ myself. I found beautiful art-filled corners, the entire texture of the tangible night. Artists reacting to their world. 

The artists are taking up space, moving into all those abandoned office buildings, using the masters’ tools like snake in the grass, art subversive, the way it has always had to be. Watch the artists change the language. Watch them change the world every day. The artists live on the pulse of Future, what they need is where it all goes. We do what we can w/ the ways we feel things, implicated by the heart of the world. Dirt in our teeth. 

Let me show you how my world feels. How does it feel to you? Like swirling kaleidoscopic wool, the softest I've ever felt, on the wall like a pelt? Like a heavy chain in the center, the center of the coffee table, the weight that is always w/ us? Like a piano littered w/ bones and flower petals and prayer candles, like an offering for eternity? Is it too soon to say we pray the same? I've never been here before and I have only ever driven these roads but yesterday I walked over from the seafront w/ the Wizard. Now, in the underbelly of our city. I think I dreamed of this place. Did I say that out loud? Christ alive, I feel funny, all restless all red.

SILVERFISH

Benjamine and I came to the Arts District to see a gallery show, sounds and poetry. The Arts District they call it and we laugh, w/ fucking Bubba's and Preble Street and an empty office space where the artists go. I just came to watch, seeking out music in my city and finding a kind of heaven on earth. I was shy again, soaring and hesitant. Everyone queer and awake and here for the show. Art on display and the titles, the materials, scratched in graphite right on the walls. Mismatched chairs. An Oriental rug littered w/ wires and pedals and instruments. An original Equibenji in the restroom, 4 horses galloping from oblivion; even better in person.

War, Conquest, Famine and Death by Benji Grignon (2023)

Benjamine and I were early, we watched the unfurling from the outside. The show opened w/ little sparks, metal on metal, holes in sweater, headphones holding back curls. Music coming up from the Earth, that long ascent like a neverending inhale into life, step by step, wave by wave. Four windows to let the sunset in. It was blue and then it was orange. The world outside the third floor became melted, molten, disco lights tabletop, fire catching and smoke. Someone said, Is that a smokebomb? The last notes still ringing out, sudden smoke among the trees, no screaming.

Both the poets present started reading from the ground. One poet sat like sweet summer sleepover, their words like sugar in iced tea. The other poet was like a seedling in the dirt, growing taller like their words were sunlight, coaxing them to grow. Then it was a harp, a halo, a mini skirt. She plucked the strings and the Earth slowed to swoon. Looped and distorted, songs biblically ambiguous, meditative w/ a body beat. She closed the show saying, I am proud of you. Thank you for being exactly who you are. There is no better time to be yourself. Thank you.

Elise’s harp

In the ides of the show, it was black black outside. Oxygen sucked out. Void was here w/ their pop-up piano, sending reveries back to anyone getting too close. I was a kind of in love. 

When I hear the void, it sounds ancient, like ancient wailing, echoing echoing waves, could be of the sea, could be of the sky, could be a swan song to the ways we thought it would feel (all of it, all of it). The void has the angst of a mother and the sweetness of soul immaculate, the one we all share and suffer through, swear and sweat through. The void distorted, reverb and translated through Time. The void still has love to sing about. The void dresses in camo, oversized, a spiral pendant around their neck. The void says, I'm forcing myself to play guitar because I'm bad at it. The void says, touch me or reach me or at least that's what I heard. The Wizard has their pen going. I'm still looking for somewhere to lay my sadness.

Tears find the ocean like finding it's own kind again, born exuberant and unwilling to a world worse than where they came from. Do you hear dolphins or birds? Do you hear thunder or horses? Horses kicking up salty water. Now and then, a night drive soundscape w/ hooting owls and presence when it is soft under the moon and I remember all those nights w/ my eyes closed. The void has CDs for sale. The void says, Moving to Portland changed my life, saved my life, I’m so thankful. Void loves Portland xoxo. 

In the end, the Wizard and I were hazy and half in dream, telling ourselves it's not that late but that we should go. They showed me their old apartment on Anderson St. In the dark, we passed a painted wall that read, Art is eternal. Life is brief. And I rejoiced in the simple acknowledgement over and over. All the Wizard and I have been talking about, all we've been making meaning of, all we have overcome to feel at home in ourselves enough to invite our real selves out to the side of the city that the city forgot.

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6/12: Truth is, I'm bored of writing about the rains that visit the sun, bored of swaying zen through the breeze, bored of open hands (my own my own) and nothing in them. I am neurotic in the space between being and doing. Trapped in it. I am dancing in place here, in a cage above the crowd here, looking down. Dancing in place like still being polite at a rock show at night, at night when my freedom wears me. 

I stretch my whole body out, under some kind of spell, what music turns me into - I allow it to be simple. I remember telling J and Orne last year or year before outside Cocktail Mary saying, I needed that, I - dancing is really good for me. 

Written after that night of dancing, from an unfinished manuscript (2022)

I admire the movers most in my life. I go wild for anyone  moving their bodies and making things, staying busy, staying alive. Sometimes I worry. Sometimes I think I dry them all up, dry up all the waters, slow them down, down here into the ground, where I am I am I am mud turning into silt into sand, moving slowly if moving at all. I am sure to get to where I’m going, I am sure to start, sure to get banged up, sure to be smoothed over by something like love, something like water, something like our bodies never actually stopping, never actually still. 

I think it's delicious, it makes me feel delicious myself, to stretch and settle and slip into life. I admit, it takes up a lotta time. I require patience to be around. I am all, this again! and circular aphorisms, these logos of life, things I am learning from going slowly. Truth is, I'm doubting words again, doubting their power, doubting their reach. I am stubborn w/ the words of me, the way I will always have them, the way they are woven w/ hopeful threads and pasted unread into my city, insignificant and temporary. An insignificant thing I do - living my life the way I want to.

Truth is, I suffer here too, between energy and inaction. Here, the hunt. My back has begun to hurt from crouching, laying so low in the grass, overstrung and hungry. The prey is present so I have to be beyond that, quick quick, and the insects are eating me now. Eyes of Desire in overwhelm and a paw hovering in the dunes.

I am trapped in repose. I trap myself, I always have. I am alive in the small moments of perfection that shatter into themselves (all around, all around). I stack stones. I stack the mud of me. I watch the wheel spin, my hands dirty and the world going round. As if I could throw myself an illustrious life! As if only a vessel, I am nothing more! 

All my pots start so off center and their walls too thin or too short. My world is one where the fences are low and the curtains allow a little mystery (a body in a house, the shape of a body in the shape of a home) where nothing goes to waste. I have been trapped before, I remember, and I freed myself then. I free myself a little more all the time (slowly slowly).

Before now, it was worse and before now, before now I was bound to stillness. I was not leaning into my hips. I was not answering the phone. I was not fluid in my being or my body. Before now I was bashing my head into the wall and then door and then the free air, in the wild blue as soon as I could find it, as soon as I could, as soon as I could find it. I hear, Your body is here too and wants to work w/ you. Wants to know if that would be OK? I wonder if all of me is invited to the party. My head overheated and the body, my body, only sweat, only dancing through.

I am my bacteria, land to be mined, grime to be gnawed, regardless of what I do or where I go. Landscape, soundscape, unmanned space, a soft and freewheeling shape, shape of Earth, shape of void, spaces to fill metamorphic and meaningless. I am strange in your handshake, so I escape escape, stranger still in the evanescent day the sun gave.

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6/13: Can I be just a body in the sun? Can I be a hot car in the sun, parked and over packed? Can I sing to myself and meet you at the beach between jobs and sweat and sweat and sweat? Cherry pits spit in the sand and out of moving cars, fingers purple and red and sweet, J and I at the beach. 

My aunt said Portland is my home and I hadn't thought of it like that yet. Home is just the sun on my skin and the music I like. My lover hungry when I get home, salt on salt we drape onto each other in the summer heat, like night touching day, turning the sky new colors, love like that, love I can take w me, love we leave in the sand. 

I drive barefoot over the bridge, seat belt over tiny bikini, a little money made in the morning and then the wide open day, singing to myself in the juice aisle, hanging the hammock out to dry and swinging day into impossible day. When I find a mirror again, I am smiling already, toasted again like historical summer. I turn brown. I slither in the muddy grooves of joy, treading dirty and uncareful at home.

I'm going to pride this weekend instead of the baby birthday. The baby is the sweetest kid I’ve ever seen but it's not about that. It’s about doing more than keeping up appearances. I made some kind of a promise to myself last year. Well, not a promise, I put it in writing. Some kind of progress of self, a commitment to it, a new kind of June, freer. I sit in the hammock after my lover goes back to work. It is still a cool blue, sunshine at 7PM, in the balance. Saying yes to myself like learning to fly. I'll stay close to my city, close to my friends. I will feel into myself. I will find something within me to celebrate, something wholly mine, holy me, holy all who came before me. 

Choice is choicelessness is choice. I can't help it, I'm like this on purpose, a sticker I put on the Vibe. I am all I've loved and feared, the blood that carried me, the desires that keep me fed. I am a freak here just like everyone else. We wear our morals on our bodies and the world looks at us like we are freaks because we find something to celebrate, something to fight for, something that makes us more of ourselves, more than ourselves. Or maybe it's just difference and the challenge to be loving of all of it. Wholly mine, holy me, holy all who tried before me.

I don't have to see it, just as long as there is a rainbow somewhere. I think about lush green grass. I think about latex. I think about my womb and then I think about myself. It is body but it is beyond body. It is usefulness but it is always beyond usefulness. It is not quite as large as purpose so much as it is possibility, possibility and meaning, wholly mine, holy me, holy all who dreamed before me. 

All I know is that I'm doing this differently, I'm doing it already. We know why doubt comes, why fear comes, we say thank you when it does. We keep our friends safe and they keep us safe. I trust the body that got me here, the red of the womb in me, its caverns wet and empty will remain wet and empty and I will keep walking upright in this life, wherever it takes me. Silver spurs in the dirt, weightless.

I'll stop calling my uterus my womb. Womb is a mother's word and I am not a mother. I am something else entirely. My eyes are closed, I don’t know if I have to know.

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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