He Says, Follow What's Alive
He Says, Follow What's Alive
May 12-18, 2025 / Nightmares and Morning Pages
5/12: I am older today – not significantly and not by any increment found outside my skin, my skin, my muscles and bones, the brain unraveling on the road distracted, trying to catch life growing before its eyes, knowing life grows, wanting to see it slowly before it's only all at once. I just feel it today. I feel how my body needs me. I find it hard to believe in Sunday but here it is. For the first time, my body reacts to corn like my mother’s is known to react. Badly. Flowers are blooming and spitting into my eyes. My body runs red w/ the tides, no kicking.
I write now in Room 206 on my belly w/ my hips elevated and open. I called my mother today while I canceled anticipated plans. I turned out my lingerie drawer - the top drawer if you’re looking. I reorganized and reprioritized. I felt the relief she would have felt, the relief my mother feels when plans get slippery, when today becomes yesterday’s echo. To stay in soft pants and do a little tidying, a little task, something that takes time w/out feeling like theft. I felt my mother’s relief in my body knowing it wasn’t all mine. I prefer to be out, on my own or in company. I like to lock the door behind me and seep into my city. I like to add a little pressure, a little perspective, aimless and still at home.
Today w/ pressure, w/ perspective, I change my plans saying, my body is a little older today, feels like my mother’s body, can you understand that? I know you can. I am on the last page of my pages w/out even realizing. I am coming up on the end of so much at once and I know there is so much that comes after. I am elevating my hips and opening them into the ground, into the dirt, contracting w/ a wholly unique kind of future.
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5/13: I write MAY in the margins and start my morning in a new book, small w/ red stripes. My morning pages journal is curling and frayed, held together w/ packing tape. No room for double margins in this one. Tearaway pages for no good reason. Yes small, yes red stripes, a little strange in my hands but a new part of the practice, a new iteration. It was just in time for a new week, spinning out at the hinge of spring that mimics summer. Raincoats and jingling keys and forest green cowboy boots. People will be looking for me today. I will be easy to find, like shadow, right behind you and in the sun.
Today, I keep writing. I keep walking. I keep killing time like it takes and takes from all off us, bullseye and down in the dirt. In leather and wool, I stomp from the seafront to the center the center. At the bar, I make a ginger beer last an hour. Chris Issak’s self-titled album plays over checkered floors and salt. I wonder if we all become floaters in this city, if we stay long enough, keeping our heads above water like this. I wonder if we become like plastic and feathers on the water’s surface, staying anywhere long enough, holding our breath like this.
The artists surprise me at the bar. All of us are looking for work meaningful, work that pays. All of us are grabbing a bite to eat before the meeting at the gallery. I tell them I am transitory and sitting still at the same time. I keep the rest to myself.
Everything w/ this small body lately is trial and error. I spent the last couple nights waiting until the haunted morning to see what would me tear from bed belly-first to the room that loves me most. Blue walls, clean tiles. In the dark, I don’t care what color the walls are. I am excreting. I am expressing. The Devil comes in small kernels and grains of rice. I used to be safe here and now I am only hungry, only agony, only way out is through. I look up in the bar, my morning separates from Now.
Today, I don’t give myself anything to be proud of except that I am on time for what I said I would do. I see dark wood and Bob Ross on the TV painting a river, painting mountains blue blue, saying, Where does your reflection go? I yawn back into the memory of morning, that pool of dreaming, that illusion of control. There was Desire somewhere still, stillness has no place in dreams. When the rains come this week like the future promises they will, I’ll be digesting time like the solid, gamey thing it is in small, painful pieces. I will find my reflection still wet in the dark.
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5/14: Most of the Magnolia have crushed softly onto the green but the tulips cheer for rain. It does a little bit, rain I mean. Wet wet Earth renewed. This side of hope is unsteady, more unsteady than dreaming. Unsteady like what age eventually does to our hands shaking. Unsteady like uneven rocks, like stems under worry heads and red petals. I don’t go out looking for strength, I go out to insert myself into the world. A world careless and always unfinished.
I slept through the night w/ dreams that left me unsteady and sweating but I don’t remember why that would be, no details. Woke w/ eternal futility and heavy lids. I’m thinking maybe that’s what hope rages against in that quiet way that hope rages - resolve that feels like blinders to the road.
In the window at the gallery, a ceramicist installed piles of swaddled clay, dried in weeping heaps in the wreckage, a city only cinder blocks and dust dust dust ash ash ash. The word hope was on the window before the install and still is now. I look down into the window and the pain feels even larger in all these little pieces. Still I am only looking at in. I am walking in my city all the way over here peering, staring too long at actual stillness, feeling afraid.
I know wreckage when I see it, it is the dead ends that I miss. I imagine futures in every shadow and new life in the dirt. On this side of hope, still nothing replaces grief.
My friend casts a spell for sun and it holds off the rain for a day, a day and I am spinning out and around myself still but at least the sun is out. Soon, I am singing in the Soul eating the crumbs of cookies I left in the car. My resolve melting like dark chocolate in the sun and this delicious, disappointing body bouncing in the driver’s seat. I lick the chocolate, get it on my tongue. I am the brown until kingdom come. I mean to say more than anything that I am grateful and hoping.
I wash out my small jar of dirt when I get home, moldy and drowning. I go out to collect more from the base of the three sisters, the three trees stoic in my yard always in conversation. I get distracted, I count less than 20 Magnolia and find some buds have held out and held on, holy in suburbia. It is green green, blessing me - sinew w/ dirt, the dirt collecting blood. Petals, white, in piles and then carried, carried, resting on the wind and going brown again away from here. The edges crisp first, nothing on Earth stays soft for long.
An animal cannot always be digging. The crows have claimed our roof and the trees around. The ants own the ground. My lover works w/ radiation today and I cry when I am close to the ground, slow and knowing OK. My webs all mangled and walked through by something bigger than me.
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5/15: Ides of May, ides of after and before, ides asleep and sand sand sand. I’ve only been listening to music from Nigeria and the Sahara. I can only look at the world from where I'm standing. My eyes your eyes all in the backseat. The ache is back and aches are easy, coming in and out like the breeze or the whip or a kind of knocking in the hallways of future.
I’m being wordy but I’m not using my words. I’m being flowery but I haven’t opened up yet, like the highest bud of the Magnolia tree. I’m being precious, using precious words and writing precious poems. My life is sharp and the blood turns brown when it hits the air, the salt, the seashore on the rocks.
I wear gray today in solidarity w/ my cat. I dropped him off at the car doctor for his first dental extraction and he was trying to haggle his way out of it, yapping. He sat in my lap for most of the drive over, drooling. I tried to sell him on a future w/ no pain. I must have sounded like a used car salesman. The way even my cat knows when something is too good to be true. Less pain, can I sell ya on less pain? A lot of pain right up front but think of it like a kind of down payment of aging into good, into goodness, into salvation. He is my son. He doesn’t want to do any of that shit. He wants to live good now. He knows now is now! Now cannot go on forever! We go back and forth like this, back and forth, my cat and me, me and me, the world and me.
I sit in my front seat now like I sat on my couch last night. While the sun was still out and I was writing my article. While I listened to a sensitive man in recovery talk about recognizing patterns and changing behavior, talk about forgiving himself and working to do better. A creative man, a man in love, a man who said, my cat saved my life and meant it. He cried when he talked about Death, his friends, his friends, and everyone, everyone gone too soon. The great loss we feel when pain wins. The great loss of Us losing You.
Suddenly the world is made of glass and I’m remembering the summer last summer when I took white vinegar all around that sculpted porcelain, statuettes of something ancient and stolen, monuments of wealth. I picked everything up careful careful. White vinegar seeped through the cotton fibers as the summer stretched.
The world is a bit like that but the monuments we build are all to each other. We keep them close, try to keep them clean, idols and lovers and friends. Those of us on the ground cannot afford to erect monuments of stone in our city squares so we carry each other through like you are a bit of me and I am a bit of you. We sit in the sand together building something and taking photos in the sun. We take the names of those we love into other rooms w/ us. We allow ourselves to be changed and we marvel at goodness when we see it (we should, we should) I think. I think we are sand and dirt and mud. I think we are sensitive and always slipping, that water is always looking for a place to flow and love is strongest when it moves most naturally. Naturally like drip drip, naturally like whoosh, in that eventual and all-consuming way that feels a little bit like doom (I read doom like destiny).
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5/16: It is a Thursday all green, the rain like a ghost in my city, humid and looming. I picked River up from the cat doctor hmm…an hour or so ago. I’ve been following him around trying to listen to his animal body like, what do you need? My boy purrs even when he is uncomfortable. He is swollen, unable to eat, unable to groom, all wet from spilling and unable to drink. His sister hisses at him from the other side of the door. The cone has to stay for two weeks, final extraction in July and then all this again. He melts in my hands the closer I scratch his neck under the cone. He is at the scratching post like a heavyweight. Unhappy boy.
I was just outside, I was smoking grass in the green and watching two blackbirds flying in from town. The dandelions perky and overgrown. I was trying to think about something besides pain and it was easy enough. Love is right there next to pain, right here next to me.
I write precious words not because life is precious but because I’m still learning the soft words, collecting them like maybe they belong to me after all. Used to be I would write all my life like it was something explosive and explicit though it was simple little messes I couldn’t see my way around. Now, I write explicit veiled, all my love deep in the ground, friction and mystery. The earth body as it writhes is something so precious, you know? Nothing is what it sounds like. I write words for your body to eat. I write every day to repeat myself. I write precious because it ages well. I am jumping ahead again. I am trying to age well. In that trying, I am falling in love w/ the world or I am believing in it or I am forcing belief in it like it will save me, it will save me, it won’t or maybe. Maybe the sunrise will never get old, not even the very last one. Maybe the changing seasons will be all the salvation we get (mercy, mercy) all the salvation we need.
When I write about the sea, I write about waves crashing and when I write about waves crashing I write about you and me, water like love always finding a way in and always flowing, our bodies that love to touch made of sand and making a mess. The way we go everywhere all at once. The ways we change and change each other. Love is the only thing that keeps us young. I’m talking about both energy and action. It’s important to have both (w/ time w/ time).
I’m standing outside watching the blackbirds scrounge on their own and I’m not thinking about pain anymore. I dig at the ground w/ my hands, collecting a little Earth in a little jar for my desk. The old mud drowned. I bow to the three sisters and I collect my mud. I touch tulip petals and I touch my mouth the same.
I like my tulips like this, petals red and falling open, lush in their easy surrender. I like my lovers like this too, everything a little hungry, a little helpless, a little less real than before. Waves crashing and softening the shoreline. Lost lost lost here, marbles left in a lost world. Only bodies now. Wet and let go, wet and we let go, wet and we go, wave by wave rushing and ecstatic. We are the whole world held in one breathy falsetto. Energy in action.
Underneath my poets’ blouse are no precious words, only desire that growls on the other side of silk. A whistle in the air looking for me but when it feels this good I’m long gone. I’ve got skin like no God has, blood that rushes and makes me flush as the dandelions. I’m carrying my shoulds helpless and hoping into summer. I am lust for life born in the blooms that wait for June July August, the blooms the bees dropped, the honey inside me.
The sun passes over my city while I yap w/ a friend, laughing at the world when it hurts like this, something just under the skin. We are pierced and poked. We know how things heal. My faith in myself ain’t too strong right now but leaving the house for a little while does some good. We talk about praise kinks and precious humanity. It is still Spring when I get home, still green, still weeds, still beauty. I don’t know what it is lately but I’ve really been chewing on my words, careful and keeping something from myself. My body heavy from all the armor inside, inside.
My elbow locked tight by my ear to hold the bow steady, unwilling yet to let go. All the while I am being eaten, bugs on my skin. All the while, I’m being loved, the sun finding me. The sunset comes again tonight. I swoon in the downswing of day, listening now, for the whistle. One day soon, I will let go, either tired or decided, and the arrow will stick somewhere as sure as the sun rises again.
Tomorrow, romantic, tomorrow, a promise made w/out us. Love for tomorrows. Time is always carrying tomorrow, like seeds into Spring, like glaciers to melt, like dirt on our hands and mouth.
My friend and I, we talked about being parasitic but we didn’t use the word. Parasitic to the land, parasitic to love, hungry again in a forever way, hopeless again in that holy way. I’m talking about the ways we use each other and need each other - all of us a little different and all of us loving in all our different ways. I’m saying we have to dig up more appreciation for that. I’m not talking about Free Love but I’m talking about free love. In that we listen and take care of each other, understand and depend on each other, commit ourselves to see each other more clearly - no expectations, no fear. Allow me some simplicity here, some preciousness. It all sounds easier than it is, it always has, maybe that’s why it’s so often corrupted.
If we are certain of anything it is this: we are imperfect. The world is lacking care and compassion. Where there was care now there is division and quote unquote deserving. I stand anti to a thing much larger than me. I’ve been feeling smaller and smaller I think. I’ve been interrupting what I think I know. I’ve been finding more in common w/ the spiders in the doorways and w/ the retired who still have to work and the buds on the Magnolia tree. I have been consistent at least, closer to the ground, but yes, I’ve been feeling small, sucking citrus to stave off the bitterness.
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5/17: OK OK OK It’s Friday and I feel like I am just now waking up to the week, wanting a better that’s w/in reach. There is so much new music out that I don’t know what to listen to first. This newness transcends all. The future is something to be built and our values create the environment for it, our hopes and limitations of them, resources and the accessibility of them, desires and the sustainability of them (oh, if there is any, seems like a contradiction in and of itself, desires sustained that don’t make us ravaged).
And yes, I took the trash down to the street this morning but I was dressed this time, denim and patent leather. My day demanded an early morning and a quick lunch w/ all natural sugars. River has stopped fighting the cone around his neck but is still unhappy, still uncomfortable, eating gingerly, wet food only. I watch him and find a peace that is closest to surrender and farthest from comfort. Surrender when change is both inevitable and so so slow. Life is simple through this lens, doing what animals do - in out up down, looking for a gentle love. Me too, I guess. I’ve hung up my old arguments of deserving and disappointment for the sake of dreaming, working, building, building monuments to hope to be eaten by nature. By some kind of miracle, there will be forgiveness for what can’t fully be explained, my cat uncomfortable for now in his body.
The sun shines on Friday wise and unruly. I see a hummingbird rush to the window while I am cleaning in the sink, red and brown. M’s spell for warmth lasts most of the week and I miss her how I miss all my friends lately, w/ guilt they would never suspect. How I yap and yap and forget to move my body. How I go silent and marvel and forget I am even in the world. Like mercury drip drip, I am made of reflections and changing shapes, a secret, inconsistent, inhaling animal afraid to let it all go.
I hope someone invites me out tonight to cheek kiss the weekend when the sun has had enough of me. I have had enough of my week of doing good, of trying to do good, of writing and rewriting and scraping good, of animal good, animal good, animal dreaming of something beyond animal good, of intentions good like quiet in the back of class nearly unseen good, like maybe good keeps us safe when we know it doesn’t. We watch good get weighed down in the rain and mocked in the blue light. We watch good get brutalized in the light of the sun, still.
I don’t know - I conjure up rocks as an image of resilience and cairns as an image of balance and care, guideposts all silent and stoic when we are at our most wearied, something that makes us feel less alone. I pile small stones on top of each other now, on my windowsill all dirty. I do feel less alone, like art and forgiveness and lights that change the shape of everything. More and more lost. More and more in love. Surrender has a kind of strength, doesn’t it? Strength ancient and instinctual, easy to trust for a little while.
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5/18: Hello, I’m looking for a way in, a way in, a world of doors and no way in. Doors for show, for the show, doors as a part of the set, the set up, everyone backstage and the show about to begin. Curtains open heavy and slow, always velvet, always dropping from the sky. How did you get here? Is everyone getting in from below? Below, where there are tunnels made of dirt and a world that makes sense.
I sit in the world now after the pre-caffeine rains, a Saturday sweetly and secretly soaked. In the Soul w/ the trunk open, I am trying to forgive the self that didn’t trust their dreams, who spent too much time thinking it was all a trick, the youth that didn’t believe in the power of youth. And oh, how we are always on our way to figuring it out, the disparity of futures that fit!
There are stages I still want to stand on and checks uncashed unwritten. I hear, a life’s work takes a lifetime. I tell the teenage tulips, I am trying to focus on the work of life, a thing timeless in its brevity. The art of here. The promise of now. I listened to all new music yesterday, the freshness kept me company, art that melts into life. New Crumb, new Billie, a honeymoon concept album I tuned out, the band from Boston that opened for the band from Maine.
GH was on the other end of yesterday’s wish, inviting me out to a show after work. We mostly walked. We mostly talked. We squished the time between us in between us, catching up. GH shrugs, he says, follow what’s alive. He talks about his life now like maybe it was destiny, like maybe he designed it himself by simply believing in it. I am happy for him and it is pure, happy to hear and hope w/ him. Feels like inviting possibility in the room while I still struggle to get born.
I believe I am 29. I believe in the glorious doom of possibility. There are still parts of myself that I am trying to get to know. There are parts of my body only touched in certain ways only ever so often. The rain has missed my skin. I’m on my knees in my dreams and keep them tucked up to my chest in sleep. My dreams remind me Desire never really goes anywhere, never really goes away. I follow Desire in circles all around the block around the venue until it feels good to go in - like how I write poems, around and around until red light turns green light, lost to capricious night.
We started w/ water and slithered through the crowd at Port City, tighter and tighter. I couldn’t tell ya how much of the opener we missed but the singer was talking solo when we walked in - about struggling, about carrying, about the bottom of the sea. He invited everyone in the venue to scream on one two three. We threw our heads back, showing the sky our teeth. Then the stage was full and vibrant, like a cartoon. Their instruments were made of joy. They danced radiant, movement made of stars, energy resembling the sun. They waved goodbye all smiles then the set changed, instruments removed and replaced. The crowd was like an upset stomach, pressurized and pushy. Hill and I were left and then right and then dancing. We demanded a certain amount of space, space for the energy to circulate.
I didn’t know what we were in for, a band described as psychedelic, three boys from Maine. Hadn’t I seen the purple bus around town? I hadn’t or only once but I felt them coming. I felt the beat come up from the ground, from the dirt, making a home in the root of me, carnal. Their set opened w/ a chant and a pollinating rhythm, like an army coming up over the hills, naked, made of dirt. I said, wow wow, all night saying it. Three boys from Maine making faces and digging, pulling music from the Earth, doing ancient things.
They have been on the bus, touring all the time, sweating in the red lights. The singer played keyboard, dark curls and a shirt I would have thrifted, brown, collared, mesh. His mouth opened up to the sky like lion yawn, like a long tunnel echoing up to Heaven. Ringing bells, lighting fires, stomping his feet, a voice dancing over hills of sound. I said wow, kept wanting to use the word unleashed. Like let loose, like no masters, no kings, a bus out back and a crowd right here, the night is silver and all electric.
The drums like the Earth’s own heartbeat. The guitar ravishing, unruly, leading us further down. The singer wide open and changing faces, changing masks, having fun w/ it, his keyboard sparking and alive. I stomped w/ them, getting spilled on and assumed about but none of my business. I only care about body. I only care about the throb. I only care about the heat in the room, fire under feet.
Songs from the bus, songs of chance, songs from my city (times like these when I feel I am lucky enough to be a visitor, here). They wrote a song for Portland and it opened w/ a whistle long into the night, can you believe it? A whistle to call all the dogs home, alive in that pithy moment when the sea swallows the sun, the ground digesting, shaking at the close of day. There was love in the simple, pounding beat. There were friends coming out to listen. It was the music I have been looking for and wanting more of. Full-bodied and from the root.
I have been thinking about poetry as naked and vagrant and music as somewhere poetry can rest easy. Now, I’m trying to figure out what that looks like for me, what it needs and how I become wet wet sand caught up in the undertow. I am mud wet in the rush w/ you w/ you w/ love. I am more solid than before. Soon I will be strong enough to be used, building monuments in the sand of a creative work of life. I twist my body around for good luck. I use my voice like always wishing (mouth open and up to the sky!) To be a thing unleashed like bark, bark, bark!
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
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