5/1: It is May and I am mud. It smells like sweet meats and oranges in the kitchen. I keep dreaming of the parts of love I keep choosing to forget, haunted. I wake a little earlier, as if that’s enough, and I admit it, I rely on simply writing my life to save it. The Magnolia that had bloomed first have gotten pushed down and pulled open by the rains this morning. At the top, at the top a few buds still hiding, holding close. That feeling of feeling strong, the one that carried my body down that mountain has dissipated and I am back to feeling soft and bloated, excited for the milk foam in my coffee this morning. Strength, as a physical feeling or as an illusion, is only meant to carry us as we carry the world - not a forever feeling for anyone.
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I’M TURNING THIRTY THIS YEAR, DID YOU THINK I WAS YOUNGER TOO?
Whenever we hire someone new at the dayjob, they are younger than me. I train them and then I watch them go back to school. I watch them change their lives and leave. They are younger than me and they assume I am their age. And like, I was their age and it wasn’t that long ago, but still. I don’t think about it often but I spend time w/ it today.
There are a lot of ways I have given up in the perfection game, but committing to a job is committing to a life. It determines how you spend your time. It determines who you’ll see, who you’ll be around. It directs you where to go, where not to go. It is how you afford to live. It is your connection to the world. It doesn’t sound cool to say, but I value work just for what it is. I have my own issues w/ labor and capital, of course, but when I can swing it, I derive a lot of self-value in my work, in being busy, in working for people I believe in and in being believed.
I am just a lover. I am just afraid to commit. I value my time when it is spread around. I fear too much responsibility. I am not driven by personal gain enough to try and work solely for myself. I want to feel aligned w/ what I do. I want to be able to afford my life and be able to help others. I want to be where I am useful, where I am needed - because in almost 30 years, I have learned there are places I’m not useful and not needed. I have learned that sometimes I leave and sometimes I stay. I have learned that there are places my heart led me to that I could be useful and could be needed. I learned those places feel most like home.
Another thing I have learned is that it is only w/ other people that anything happens in this world. Creation, destruction, dreams coming true, wars and the movements against them, how drugs are distributed and how bodies rinse their systems (for good and w/ fingers always crossed), how weapons are created and how games are created and how futures start to look different, how families grow together instead of apart, how art is made. Community is the only way anything ever gets done and I am so relieved! We walk in the same mud! We are all stomping together! And I just love to be included. I love to be believed. I love to go hand in hand and hip to hip.
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I am doing the slow thing and the risky thing, the way I have always done everything, for better (for better for better for better) or worse (or worse worse worse). There is a way my instincts go against me often or I have been tickled by them too many times to sit w/ them for long. There is a way I am stubborn (yes). There is a way I am only here to watch (yes). There is a way I am the last to know if what I want is what I want (crash bang boom).
But listen, listen, there is a part of me that wants to grow up already. This other part is rebelling still, resisting forever, dumb tattoo. This other part knows there will be time for that later, so much time. I have no desire to bottle youth, just wish we had more time w/ it.
There is a little note on the extension cord in Room 206, directing us to use the remote by the door, saying, it is very easy & very nice, ty you’re so nice. The fake fire roars. I am still young enough to do cartwheels, here and to admit. It is true, I value childish things, like art and love. It is why I am the Fool eternal.
Everything besides the Fool has been an act, a costume, I’ve been playing dress-up, hasn’t everyone? And now now now in velvet and in bells, I am alive again! Alive for me! Alive for you! It is everything at once! Joyful and desperate and wet and afraid. Mud, mud, mud, look at me here in the mud, right where I came from.
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I get down on the ground here, in Room 206. It is empty and I am carrying something heavy in the center, the center of me. I am rolling and jumping. I somersault on hardwood and for the first time, it hurts my spine. I stay low down, low and wide, deep deep and stretch close to the ground, all the way down. Back into the earth again, I move everything through me and grind it down like coffee grounds - coffee grounds in the compost and the compost in the ground, remember, remember, that first apartment in my city, how the coffee masked even the most rank smell of rot.
I lift myself up like roots in the flood, languid, by the neck. I bend in half at the waist and I see a world, upside down and made for me, made for us all, made by us all, all the paintings on the wall and all the tools to share, enough chairs for everyone. It is empty in room 206 and still, I am sat here on the floor.
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SWEET, SWEET SELF PROMOTION MOMENT to say that I have been invited to read at the Press Room in NH next week. I have to figure out my 10-minute set still but I am honored to be up there with so many exciting local poets and musicians. It should be a good time.
𖦹Hope to see some friends there𖦹
A page I dog-eared from my Nightmares & Morning Pages series ~ thank you for reading