I'm A Lover, But I'm In It To Win
November 2025/ Nightmares & Morning Pages
11/1: When the pumpkins rot, I will believe in possibility again. I send a voice memo to my deepest friend and feed this thirsty root. I wonder what it is I still don’t believe. What is it that I need to stand a little straighter and aim towards? Why do I so badly want to be an ugly thing? Is it to keep out the people who want to know me or just the people who want to keep me? The cat that turns its back and decides to swipe. The weekend is here in its lazy sweetness. My lover calls me down to sing Papa Chickie’s favorite Beatles song. I bounce down the stairs. Everyone is so alive in the living room. T and his brother and their father.
Gunnar knows his bass. It keeps him young, electric, connected. I think of guns and cancer and dust. Rockstars dying and how it feels to give a shit about it. The dead keep dying. The cabinets and kitchen sink rattle when my baby hits the kickdrum, alive alive. Mic in front of my mouth. 1,000 electric cords tangled in my living room.
I like the ones where the singer is untouchable, is lost, is in love. Today, I am soft w/ myself. Soft clothes, time is mine, no conclusions. The sun makes me cry & cry. I lay my head down in a pit of snakes, hissing darkness, singing, youuuuung blood! I tell my friend in a voice memo, I want to spend my life digging into everyone I know, you especially. I say, Never enough time, never enough. I say, If you want me, come find me. These baited lines in the water don’t really know where to reach me. I’m up here, in the dark corners, staying dry and watching what floats to the surface, already dead or fighting. This web shakes when the world shakes.
I remember once when I was perfectly drunk on a mechanical bull in the Florida heat. I know thighs around hips and holding on like animals. I remember small, small earthquake in San Francisco. I remember dangling from the rock wall. Holding on is what I do best, clutch and cling. Lately, my teeth have been shifting in my mouth. In my lover’s mouth. In the Wizard’s mouth. Has me asking, what else is out of alignment? My tongue, wet, takes inventory of my teeth. My thoughts these days left fearfully unfinished. I slip when I walk through the door.
My friends can find me walking in the West End w/ the wild eyes while the world dies. There’s a desperation in my steps, a uncertainty in my fingers. Am I redeemable? Is anyone? And your shadow, how long has it been walking in front? I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping.
We know how the song goes but we have the lyrics, the sheet music, have to run through it once or twice until our bodies remember. Sensitive machines, wet and muddy things learning to move. My hair grows even more, hanging flat like a willow all brown. Now November. The dead keep on dying. This time I taste blood.
A bat on the back of my neck now, under my hair from when I was feeling restless & the veil was too thin. I followed desirability w/ fear. Change shape. Change form. A bat, a biting thing. I loved the familiar deep, black rumble at the base of my spine, ink going in. When I saw myself clearly, I trembled, turned away. I was exaggerated in the daylight. I turn to the world, I say, If you want me, come find me. I’m split up all over the city. If you see me, see through me. I’m nerves & static up here. Sparking wires out towards the front row, little fires all embarrassing.
My brother’s weed doesn’t agree w/ me. I don’t agree w/ my brother. A god is dying at our feet, we agree. It’s what we do next that splits the road. Turns out, I am used to being disagreeable. I turned to disruption before compliance. I believe the mess to be holy, the stupidity too. I believe difference to be a unifying thing - or not difference, but uniqueness. Remember? It gets tangled quickly. Everyone’s hair growing. Shared brushes and elastics, extra combs in the car. Maintenance. Things take the time they take. I’ve learned that one already.
This is another, Goodbye for now! A salute to the limitlessness while the leaves fall & fall, pile up & pile up. It’s only for a while as the reaper fills his pockets. They say he is sweet like a lover. I hear fingerpicking strings around every corner. The dogs stopped howling in the cold, more like a whimper now. No more whistling. I dare to be more than a heartbeat in a cave.
I love all the creatures that live inside me - breathing, changing, soaring things. You will never hear me say, I am nothing w/out you! but sometimes I feel it. My ego, a sick vomiting thing. Green. Learning again to need itself when the flagellation is done.
✺
11/3: I step further into the shadows and become more than fingerprints on glass, more than a mouth on a microphone, more than what I have fallen behind on. Back to body in the perverted November, unraveling.
My best friend calls to me in the electric air, caught by a marathon in New York City. Electric, too, my bare feet planted on the salt lamp, rooting in after the rains washed me away from myself. Electric, too, hot touch love in our suburban shower. Electric, pomegranates broken open to my right while I write.
The cold comes and I can’t stretch my hips open wide enough. I seduce my brain towards trust and ease. I imagine stringing painted glass beads on my silken thread, trusting it’s strong enough, trusting it will hold while hips sway & hair whips, necklace or waist chain, metal and movement and god, how freedom feels feels feels. Freedom can look like anything at all! Like enduring love, the way it is, the way it has to be. We learn our patterns and love anyway! Did I say something funny? Is joy all nonsense? Yes, & essential.
I’m dancing here, thinking of you. That has to count for something. You know me, how it’s always about the right song w/ me, can sway and be swayed, flittering in and out, getting stuck in your hair and getting free, getting free, getting free. A lifetime is too short for the kind of love we need.
✺
11/6: My country is blood-soaked imported denim w/ a socket for your gun, for your wallet, for your cross hail Mary mother of God. Everyone is looking at the door. Everyone squinting from the hard light. Everyone reaching for weapons for or against. I think it should all be ripped out and gutted, I say. Hot, hot empire, whipped into complacency. Hate is easy all of a sudden.
All day, we talk about hope, all hollow. We try to find each other in the underground. All day, we talk of hope like change in our pocket, like What can we afford, and cost of living, and better than nothing. At dayjob, we talk about nickels and dimes. I say, Cash is king like Love will save us like I know what any of it means. I think about thirst and endurance and Future while it is dry and getting dryer. It is strange to think today I may be as free as I will ever be.
When I grab lunch, it comes w/ a shot of whiskey for the dread and a cowboy at the counter to talk to. All day, we talk about hope like drops in a bucket. Sticky bar top, stinky pits, 75* degrees in November and I know nothing I write here changes what here really is. I am hungry for warmth. Everyone at the bar today is holding onto a darkness. I think about what adventure means, now, in context of wanting to run away.
If I could be angry and stay that way - if we could all be angry and stay that way, angry until change, change until glory, until safety, until OK. To be angry and more of who we are, more of who we are and more of us. More of us as it unlocks new life for everyone else. My dreams feel foolish today. If I’m honest, they’ve felt foolish for a while. What does my neighbor need? How can I find my friends? What do they need? What is the air around my family like today? I weep and weep like my tears will monetize and become useful. I read Mary Oliver. I pay my bill w/ more than good will.
Poetry today feels like a salve, like a savior, like a waste of time, waste of breath, like empty air, like a powerful spell, like something changed time and time again in tragedy, like hope, like a wish, like something we do to keep ourselves going, as long as we keep going, looking clearly at the world we live in, feeling deeply w/ the world we find ourselves mourning.
✺
11/7: This week, the Wizard asked me, Have you been writing about the moon lately? They mean have I been feeling my feelings. I am all Aw shucks in the Autumn leaves.
I see her tonight between telephone wires and traffic lights. Quickly, quickly, the sun moves across the wall. She is stretched out like a worn leather belt. She is dimming like the fire winding down in the cold. She gives me orange and pink and then black black black. I’m being haunted still. My reasons are my own and I can’t be wrestled w/. I am imperfect.
On a night like tonight, I take the long way home from the mill, only long enough for one song. I see her and start writing in my head. I lose it halfway to the page. At the stoplight, I look at her and pretend not to hear what she’s saying, too focused on her mouth in the sky. Before I know it, we find a way to talk to each other in that inevitable, fateful way. I trust her to open up as the month rolls on. Captivated in all of my free time, turning to see who’s shining on me.
Trash in all my pockets from Halloween. Smell like sweat, smell like coconut and vanilla. The cowboy boots stay on and the sun sets right past me. My body is plush. I stretch my hips, my wingspan. I feel hatred numbing in the land in which I live. I don’t let it interrupt me. I am rooting into something deeper still, excuse me, something that will feed me, that needs me, that functions circularly. The drums, the drums, the music I always knew was playing. A vicious love, bubbling and boiling beneath all the bullshit. So nuanced it’s simple.
✺
11/12: Tuesday, the winds warn. The fog dissolves the moon, sucking away all the flavor and swallowing. Me? I sit anti-blissful, purgatorial possibilities all in love w/ my cobweb habits. Trash in my passenger seat, cruel to those who miss me, moss growing on my dreams.
I park on the dead end facing Ivy’s apartment. Tuesday, to a traveling puppet show. Yesterday, I hung up posters while the houseless sang and the police marched down the spine of my city. Congress St. in the cold. The winds coming for my youth and doing ritual dances for change, leaves shifting about in circles. My angels, where are my angels? Behind glass somewhere. Like a bird, I fly right into it, foolish and smacking. Who’s to say if I will know better next time?
I finished Queen of the Damned & I sing the cover songs. I keep myself company in the Soul, the heat running. I cry slow, cowboy tears for fictional futures. I think about what I’ve been talked into & what I’ve abandoned. I think about tobacco leaves in my teeth and my bare skin in the cold. I am a magical thing in that my right hand never knows what my left is doing - hiding the j and misplacing the book and crumbling dreams into a ball, it is. It is slicing into the nail bed by accident w/ a newly sharpened kitchen knife, meant for basil and bleeding ripe rubies. I will watch this thing heal through to December.
I cover my eyes and say, Let me see, let me look. I ask my friends to stand close to me when I find out. The wind coaxes the sea from her rocky coves like calling a wild dog back home. My friends and I dress comfortably, covering hands, covering ears, to face the cold and smoke in it, to hold close to what could be miracles. Could be, could be, creatively conceived in a younger world, a dying world, refusing to die w/ it, for now, at least for now.
My home has always cast heavy shadows of should, no place for an animal like me to grow. Yet, I sleep how I have slept for half my life. Fear on all sides. Fear everywhere there is light. In kind company, I see clearly. I am growing into a creature of consequence. A feeling thing still. Sensitive. Alive & gnawing on the clock. The Wizard drew me an inky spiral and I grew stronger. My boy carved pomegranate seeds for me and I ate them slowly. A stranger lent me a lighter and we got to talking about the city, the city, the songs she sings and her flirting eyes w/ the sun.
This fall was spent moving back into the shadows and sobbing in short bursts, potent w/ the huff of OK OK OK, of Enough, of Now. I’ve chosen alone for much of Autumn, by comparison, and everyone I know has grown deeper. New dimensions every time a door opens and we step through in a different way, embodied. Everything becomes that much more desperate, more precious. I’m listening for the fear like grooving to the bass in the living room, trying to follow along, trying to find what feels good, what keeps me on time, on tempo, in harmony, until it becomes its own thing, natural, until it becomes beyond me.
Out of the shower, I sat w/ the boys and fondled the strings. Black mirror, wet groove. Finally getting the hang of it near the end there. Bare shoulder & Oh, I know this one. This rambler sings a hallelujah to fear and the world growls. A toilet flushes in finality. We all take a long sip and gulp down the world. It is a desperate, precious time we all share. Fear interrupts the poetry, the words of our friends, the word of God, the God that looks different to each and every one of us because God is each and every one of us. Spirit animated, dancing and shifting in circles like leaves floating over the concrete. I see my name in telephone wires. I meet my friends exactly where they are. As I age, I ask my body what it is I haven’t been listening to. I find it every day.
✺
11/13: Dog-Ear, free to read for now
Puppets Telling Stories
Bread & Puppet presents: Gray Lady Cantata #9 & The Possibilitarian Imperative Everything Show ~ The following is some writing I did after attending my first Bread & Puppet performance while they were on tour. I was inspired by the craftmanship, dedication and storytelling - showing joy to truth, and truth to power. When the show ended, I felt electric …
✺
11/14: In my body, in the sun, holy in unknowing and singing my angry songs again. My dark haired friends and I stick close in the water, lilies all closed up and nodding close together. Easy, leaning my weight on your weight. Bad tattoos in crowded rooms. Stretching on the floor in empty minutes. Saying bad when we mean it. Saying love when we mean it.
Ivy says she bleached it all, the spot outside her home where the stranger made a home of dirt and piss, right there under the stairs. Bleached the floor and bottoms of her shoes, wept when she called the police to cull him out of there. Wept for now. Wept for safety or the idea of it, of another night to get through and careful cleaning. J writes a poem for blue, for cobalt, for returning to herself after losing it to love for a summer. She wraps herself in a scarf, takes her rings off to cook and to sleep. When I feel useless, I remember I am interwoven. We are keeping warm, holding close, doing our best, helping the whole dream along.
✺
11/21: I am writing in bed as the winter asks. The boys play loud in the living room. I throw out the flowers, wet and rotting at the ends. I am giddy w/ my dreams in a zip-top leather pouch. I am punching the stars, unworthy & unrelieved. Crashing from the high of last night, a basement celebration of the Dirt. Life is a drug all its own, I said at the bar last night, anticipating looking down down down. Over the edge, over the ledge, wet wet ground below. Back into the Dirt I go.
My baby plays that ol’ Neil Young song. I stretch out on my own and ask the angels to play some Stevie Nicks instead. I sit w/ my hips open wide, listen to my jams, listen to my body, reminding myself, you do not have to be good, you do not have to be good, and whatever else Mary Oliver says. I listen to my friends, though far. I listen to my body, though shy.
I remember telling the moon the moon the moon that night - the moon, plump & pregnant. I asked the moon for her help, help me lose this control, an illusion like all the others, but breaking my heart, this control. This control that interrupts me and takes me out of my body. Here, I forget what is most important. Here in the spotlight. Here w/ this red recording light, the part of me left to history.
The first thing I did in that basement was turn the lights down, dimmer, darker. The poets are coming down into the stone basement, closer to the Dirt. A reading, a celebration, papers for sale. The way I was sparking off in the filled room. I felt into every corner, between every knee and every shoulder. Unworthy of this intimacy yet in no place to pretend, no place to perform but I must, right there on that stage in the corner. Seeing my friends first thing. Tight hugs, somewhere to lean my head and be held. All the hands that came and helped this come together.
I pledge allegiance to this intimacy of this room! A party for the Dirt, the art, the thing we have in common, this small city. The paper, yes, but now, the words. The words in everyone’s ears, the art in everyone’s hands. Standing room only for this thing we made. We had prepared for everything except our mouths in our overwhelm. I’ve never been thanked so much in my life, was mystified by it. Where was my ego now? Green as a patch of grass in the West End, covered w/ leaves, spiders in there.
Later at the bar, Moses & I discussed faith, belief, the god found in companionship. All night, felt like I was making eyes at the felt experience of shared values, conspiratorially having something to believe, like art will safe us after all, art and all the people that come with it. It is funny to finally write again after the air has changed. A before. An after. Like so many others that go unnoticed on any other day w/ less going on.
It’s true. I haven’t been writing, have been hiding, have eaten only enough calories for a child w/out realizing again. Finding triumph delirious after the sun sets and it must be dinner soon, must be back to dreaming soon. I’m braindead from the smoke and a haunted afternoon, remembering nothing I can’t touch, can’t feel, if I can’t tear up from the heat of it, if it can’t make me bleed, if I can’t watch the needle pierce the skin and feel it scab in the coming days.
A bat flaps its wings loud in my ears and I wake up in the too familiar, all soft. Percale cotton sheets where my skin rubs off and my cats shed fur and lose whiskers, where my lover and I sweat on opposite nights. I am awake in America’s northeast, finding my friends in the city unless they find me. It is mid-November now and the frost is coming soon. The way love moves from liquid to solid. The way the Now is alive & in everything. Reality is the boulder on its way back down.
The other night, my lover said, If writing helps you, then you should make time for it. I finally believed him when he said it. I waited until today to begin again. I pulled my book out again and took it w/ me. I kept it closed & left it behind while I was sweating under the moon & shook out the ghouls. Left this book behind the couch while we sat topless in the sauna at 104*, ice dripping down our backs and sizzling. While a friend led the room through movement and I let it all blur. Writing is movement too, like dancing, like stretching out your hips, something only we can feel, our lives that beg to be felt. I beg to be held & let go, held & let go. Afraid to hold back as tight. I vow this year to more movement, in all its forms. Alive while our gods die. In a basement and beyond, in a city familiar w/ movement. Dirt overturned since the beginning and then more & more & more.
What lies at the roots of our world is bodies and rot. We are looking now, have to look now. I am fumbling through trust, bluffing through to believe, doing my best to do my best. Every day, I wake up & try to remember my dreams.
✺
11/22: Oh, me? I feel crazy, knowing my body needs me and maybe no one else does. I’m feeling protective again, wearing silver when I invite people in. Just because I’ve stopped believing in right & wrong doesn’t mean the binary of it is broken. My mother only cares about how I am - nothing else. When I call her, I get to pretend it matters. I do all my chores while on the phone, not looking at what my hands are doing, where my feet are going. I find my place in the world when it isn’t looking for me. When we hang up, I eat something. I believe in the goodness of my body again. I let that be worth enough.
Across town, the Wizard is working, wrestling w/ pride, wrestling w/ shame, the same demons in the same salted sky, as if perfection ever saved anyone. An angel orders a breakfast sandwich & preaches forgiveness. I get a text, a message of love, love that can be hard to digest but vital. It was raining as my dreams dissipated this morning - dreams of vampires in the city and someone being right all along. Now, the sky is clear and blue, the kind of blue J never wears - a child’s blue, not a cobalt. I read her poem and kill my platitudes.
The Wizard and I are all apologies after the praise. We slink back into comfort, under covers, back to the smallness we are used to. Three sips make you taller and one sip shrinks you down. Our armor, it’s too big for us now. We’re a little lost in it. So much of this year has been about realizing my size and watching my shadows grow wide. Sometimes the sun is up above and sometimes, down at the Devil’s cloven feet.
We see things in ourselves exaggerated, things that most others cannot see. We know each other through how we know ourselves. We journey together, metal overhead, searching beyond safety. The other night, the Wizards & I talked in trust about power, how it is inherent to each of us, how we each are responsible for it in every breath. I think about how I was foolishly denying, refuting, refusing, avoiding the responsibility of it. A muscle I am still working on. Intentions like an exercise, the body following a rhythm.
Every morning, I wonder why balance is so unsteady and hard to find, hard to keep, hard to prioritize. In my power, I blame myself. In my power, I move forward anyway. I point to slow, I point to difficult, I point to risky. I hear the Wizard say, both proud and defeated, I know what I am. They say it often, over and over. We trust our friendship, helping each other do good. We grow in one instant and return to form in another. We hold our power, unsure of its importance, its identity.
Under the full moon, the Rabbit said to the round room, Release your shame. I kept my eyes closed and my head down, bent at the waist. Shame rushed to my head like blood. I mimicked flowers bent brown & broken, facing the ground they ached to return to. Top heavy w/ it, the unworthiness. When the song changed and the tears in my eyes were easy, the light returned. The crowd in the round room, writhing & releasing & finally dancing unmoored, weaving organic harmony. Bodies in space, taking it up, nearly missing and pulled into orbit of each other. Red candles lit in the middle, feathers laid out around. Here, where power is equal and everything can be exorcised. Bodies at the end of everything. Bodies at the end of every day.
✺
11/26: Writing on my own, out to eat, feeling like a dangling thing on a tree or in the window. Cold, finally. Cold, of course. I haven’t been waiting exactly, but now that it’s here, I almost enjoy it. I stick my face up towards the sky and breathe in deeply. Feels nice, I say and it doesn’t matter if I mean it because it is heard. It inspires. It catches on. A song I love plays, has been following me.
The sickness from early in the week is still in my throat. I order broccoli cheddar soup and yank holly off the branches in the driveway. I don’t know why I sat by the door except that I’m looking to be found today. It swings open under Christmas lights, under green and white stripe awning, and lets in the winter all eager like a child. The coyote in the corner caught his kill but can never eat it, dead together above the emergency exit.
Yesterday, when I was feeling better, the rain decided to walk w/ me. I cleaned the corners. I wandered dumb in the craft store. I used a gift card from 2020 for a facial. I lay flat under blankets and acids and oils. All warm, I wrestled w/ whether or not I deserved it. Four years ago, I did a job and got this gift card and now I’m cashing in. My pores filled black are now flushed. My cheek fat lathered and jiggled. Fingers worked the tension in my chin and on my forehead, smoothed the wrinkle between my brows. I almost cried at the intimacy of having my pimples popped one by one. I left shiny and red, back into the night.
My friends w/ their hoods up in the black rain. We meet in the East End where the stones have been arranged in an organic circle, sliced too smooth and dripping wet. We help each other through the mud, the hurt, the dirt. We want to be told when we are thoughtless. We want to be called out when we cause harm. We want to be held by the things that we hold and by the people who call our names. Natural. Important. Moving through to tomorrow & tomorrow, showing up and letting down simultaneously.
When I thought of November back in August, I heard, something different, something different, something different - the phrase worked itself into a fervor. I want to know when people need me. I want to be there like it’s easy, so easy.
Cheese, all gooey, pools onto the plate and I miss tobacco again. It’s just that time of year. The bar is full and I’m writing down dreams I forgot about. Busy Wednesday, back in town or out of town or, like my good friend Coast, a plan of peace and solitude above all else. Who do I want to talk to? Someone who doesn’t really know me but wants to. Soup all gone too soon. That’s me, sitting along and scraping the bottom of the bowl while it’s still hot.
✺
11/27: The Workshop Podcast, Pt. XI
✺
11/28: Identity, sticky and entitled, you won’t find where you belong. The crutch of personality - a habit, we know this. Linger on, something you once were. I stare at this ceiling and see myself clutch and cling, a body smaller than the one I’ve gotten used to, and engulfs by comparison. I thought of a tenderness I didn’t think myself capable of in either direction. For once, courage - force the winds to change. The little girl is only crying because I am crying and I hope she believes me when I tell her all this isn’t her fault. I hope she believes me when I tell her she can change whenever she wants, can be something truer, something new.
Belief is a liquid and identity, sticky and entitled. We make a mess trying to set up the projector, the audience is growing impatient and drowning with the tides. Is it really up to us? Can we even try to turn this around? Someone is hitting the buzzer over and over again, but I can’t hear it, thank fuck. I empty my pockets. I slip into the coat of who I’m becoming, finding beauty in how everything falls apart. I go out into my city where the lights are dim and I start to believe in the flow of things. I find my friends or they find me. I dance and dance until dream & dream. I hear a voice first heard asleep.
I know your wounds, the voice says, and I am unable to place it, in ways you haven’t allowed yourself. Listen, it was a good idea at the time but Now looks different than before. We know this. There is work to be done if you continue to care. Time to learn the living language baby, time to decimate this false reality. We have shown you new colors, new ways light moves through the trees. We have seen you coddled and clinging. We have seen you trying to get free.
✺
11/29: In my dreams, I flirt with my stalker as he chases me all around that warped world. The most dangerous thing he says: I like you in a dress. I wonder which part of me dreamed this one, the lost or the lustful? In dreams, I see parts of me I haven't looked at in a while: curve of my shoulder, warmth between my legs, the bare throat of surrender. Every part of me is waiting for a surprise. I start to dress in silks and supima, soft fabric doing all the dancing. I am reminded that I can't make up my mind, even here. But is it my mind that is undecided or something else? Something fleshy whose voice has changed or is everyone just talking at once? If there is a truth, it will be shouted, shouted and drowned by its opposite.
Truths don't cancel out. They fall in love for a weekend, they make a mess, they become one in the same. One by one we taste the weekend and our lives change. The truths / the truth / no source aside from the feel of it. I go North, free in the cold, and become a symbol of freedom for someone else. I like my body like this, below the moon.
Someone is trying to find out my secrets so they can sell them. I hear the whistling again, long and low, desperate for a dog liberated. The camera has replaced the mirror and I've gone stiff. I believe in the spotlight. I believe it does things to people, makes them do things brand new and invites everyone to watch, come watch. Welcome to the Epic Theater of a Girl. I was naked and alive before I was anything else. Now there's a fear, brief and acute, a rock at the bottom of my womb.
I am fertile and restless / life struggles to get over itself. The spotlight swings a little and stops. It blinds and invites. The girl at the center is learning the line between pleasure and pain. She will be dirty, now. She will feel it always. There is beeping, everything undead and beeping, and once, a void and a voice. Is it warm or is it cold? Is it singular or echoed through time? The girl does not know. She hears Don't worry, we’re not recording your body, She hears we're recording your scream.
Playing peek a boo with destiny, playing peek a boo with what we think we are / where we think we are going / what we think we deserve. It has never been about deserving, never will be. Don't let poets lie to you. Sometimes, when I can't face myself, I rub my face raw. Sometimes, when I can't fit into my life, I reach out to someone who already does. Fit, I mean. In my life, I mean. How we meet people who fit seamlessly (like you have always been here) and we learn too late how to cherish them. How friends across time will be in a city a week before I am in that city and we moan through our phones. Holy passenger! Holy gas! We know how long life is, sometimes we forget it's brevity! The curtain teases with finality! I know your phone never dies, but mine does sometimes. Sometimes I can't leave the passenger seat. Sometimes I am just playing peek a boo when what I need most is someone to see me.
✺
11/30: Our bodies fell into the internet and became something else - everlasting and just something to look at.
This is how we mourn our youth. We start young, before blood and bone. I flitch at the voice telling me to grow the fuck up. Shame is, at heart, a teacher. To be ashamed of love, ashamed of joy, too smart to trust, too in love to care, to be trying everything on, the whole store, and walking out naked, to be clutching and clinging to necks and legs and the old ways I knew myself to be. I was alive before anyone touched me, I just can’t remember. I don’t even want to look.
Sometimes I think of towers and the lonely rooms up top, I think of houses off the grid in the mountains. I think of bombs being shipped to schools and suburban homes and the lonely men constructing them. I think of how men have made loneliness violent. I think of giant fingers tapping on the glass and a hand grabbing my ass, the images overlap. So often, I imagine long falls from towers and horses breaking out into a run. And lately, lately, I’ve been thinking of the circus and a wheel that never stops spinning, the spiral and willful hypnosis, the spiral and where we each fall off.
Here is how things move: a blink and a breath at a time. I am being swallowed by the spiral and breaking out into a run. My heartrate drowns out the hurt. Joy shivers in the summer, or it sizzles, either way it is in motion, either way it is warmer to stand within it, to shake and sweat and sigh within it. I am not looking at the door as it opens and closes, just excited to see what the room fills up with and who will come laugh at the world with me.
Who will pretend we have it all simply because we have each other? I have found that the night stretches long for those who want to drink it up slowly, that friends will tell you how much you mean to them if you ask. Glasses in a toast at the start of winter and roses handed out at the bar when we are too cold to walk anywhere else. I would have kissed you if we had eternity. I am here for now. A blink, a breath, I’m telling you it all changes so quickly.
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
“Our bodies fell into the internet and became something else - everlasting and just something to look at.
This is how we mourn our youth.”
Oooo. Perfect match for that surveillance oligarchy t shirt.