One Thing At A Time, Abundantly

April 14-20, 2024 / Nightmares and Morning Pages

4/14: All quiet in the sun and the permeating thought that the future may still feel like this. The past, too, has felt like this, like the sun in the sheets w/ us, like nothing hiding underneath, like quiet in Spring while the Northeast prepares for a show.

We find it easy to be sweet when we can sleep in a bit. Sunday w/ our week of mess. There is no need for apology, just happy we have what we have. My lover and I dream of opening the windows again, of motorcycle rides in a glowing afternoon, of happy accidents and only a handful of future at a time. When I am only dirt, he pats me down into Earth. When he is all dry and cracking, I am a flowing thing, bringing color, encouraging growth and sweetness. We have seen what Spring can do, years and years of her together, rolling in the grass where all our little beginnings can be found.

The Hologram says, don’t look at me! Find pen. Find paper. Find tee shirt at the back of the drawer, something w/ less weight to it. The sky says, Soon. The stars behind the sun say, OK. I say, hello and good morning, and my feet squish into the mud on my way to work. I wear green & brown to blend in, cotton knit and cowboy boots. I’m thinking of my city, a buildup of salt and mud and finally, people outside walking.

I’m thinking about a sun that sets after dinner and a bar w/ a few open seats. I’m thinking of my throat clearing up, more like mountain run-off and less like a slushy heap. I am thinking of all my Fridays and Saturdays smelling like sweat and spent w/ friends, clipping our hair up and pulling it back down, growing growing, the wind on our necks like a careless, caressing thing. I’m thinking of M’s long nails wrapped around steering wheel and tearing open sugar packets. I’m thinking of brown hair w/ a shine and layered jackets of denim. I’m thinking of T and I carrying the cats into the yard, of J and I playing cards at the bar and in the park, of rushing water on days all humid. Did I tell you J bought the same boots as me, black and green Dan Post? We walked around our city, knowing where we were w/out knowing where we were going. This is a start, or an easy continuation, of what comes after Spring. Until then, I’m holding onto easy smiles across the way in our blue and green city, and poetry by the sea.

G & J & green & black cowboy boots x2

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4/15: Rolled the window down on the ride home to hear the peepers, in the dark by the swampy farmlands. Propped the window up this morning to hear all the birds in the glittering sun, something alive and looking forward. My poetry today is asleep in the pollen, enough to make my eyes itch and silent, silent, like the promise of life. It is the yellow in the green and my face is in the dirt. Rocks and clumps on cheeks and eyelashes. I am humiliated, here, and only human. A human smelling Spring, a human calling their mother, a human clearing space for change in a home of dust and citrus. We are renting, yes, just outside of the city that feeds me, trying so hard to afford it. 

My poetry is there, too, in my city in my city, blowing on the wind. It is spinning out; it doesn’t need me. And though my body is porous, I have love to hold onto, like something semisweet and solid, like chocolate, like dirt, like protein w/ the caffeine and knees too close and knocking into each other around a small, circular table. 

Do you feel the rush? Are you ready? How my city changes season to season, becoming something else, sandcastles and the sun through storefront windows. Only choices from here on out, choices made in the sun. Do the trees make choices? Does the soil? Are the bees free? Do the peepers find the wetlands all on their own? And when I write, choice, do I believe myself? Do the buds on the bushes out in my yard look up, look up at the sun and ask, Now? 

The start of a handful of vet trips for the boy

There is such thing as instinct. There is instinct that precedes choice and precedent that proves process. There is help asked for all the time - I learn every living thing asks a little differently. In the dirt that I have been lying in, I have been watered and cared for, the roots of me growing down down deep deep, getting tangled under my world, growing juicy and thick in the ground. The soil is good. The sun is forever. 

I have been asking the Earth all these questions, or the same question, the same question in all these different ways. And when the wind whips, changing directions, I know she is irritated w/ me, like I am irritated w/ me, all muddy and still, pulling in w/out giving back, growing down instead of out. I swear I am green under here, unafraid eventually, poetry like pollen lost and dancing throughout my city.

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4/16: Last night, I caught the scent of surrender but couldn’t follow it all the way home. Last night, after I lowered my defenses, the sun peeked into the kitchen where T was standing in a white tee, marinating the chicken and leaving dishes in the sink. The sun brought w/ it romantic shadows to the softened chrome of the faucet and basin, to the stiff rose petals inside and upside down, deep burgundy. It bounced off the woven chainmail of steel that we use to scrub the cast iron pan. It glistened off of the cleaver, flat, menacing, suspended. It flashed through the colander like fractured bits of stars on the hardwood floors. It lit up golden curls and dirty fingernails and the white flag I keep waving and stomping on w/ muddy boots, something that once made us feel safe, now only sometimes.

see what I mean? My God

God is in the sky w/ fire where God has always been. God is in these plastic Halloween rosary beads. God is in all the ways to love differently than before. 

My cuticles raw in the defrost and my cats fighting over that one pillow in the window this morning. I’m asking for forgiveness but I don’t believe I’ll ever get it. I show up at the vet, at dayjob, at poetry, in all kinds of mirrors. I catch the sun just right so I can be made of a little more than darkness - there’s gotta be something more. I wear white lace when I feel dirty. The breeze today holds a warmth we haven’t felt since September. On the bricks of my city by the sea, an egg cracked open and splat. Mud gone dry. The promise of eruption.

I wear white lace when I feel dirty

Do you sweat every time you wear lace, too? Do you feel remorse every time you open your mouth on an overdressed Spring day? I park on cobblestone side street while visitors park for valet and meet for dinner, while the poets recite their sins, while the tides come back in. Today, windows are rolled down and the seagulls smell blood. Suddenly, summer is some kind of stigmata on my city, scars in the shape of our city squares, green green green instead of red.

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4/17: Dog-Ear, free to read for now

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4/18: This morning, I have a few different holes I could dig, a few half-familiar paths to consider. I am writing first thing in the morning and pretending I know what I am doing. That funny thing that narrative does, only a trick, OK OK OK.

I think now about all that I don’t know until surrender feels like a laugh, like celebration, like a sunny afternoon. The sun slipped into my dreams, and I am finding optimism, the kind of bright side that the Fool carries in their sack. I have gotten in trouble here before. I have found the fruits of life here before. This has been enough some days to live, to want to live, to live. I am walking again in circles around the center. I know purpose stronger here than anywhere else. 

My boy heals. Money is water. A small taste of love lasts a long, long time. 

It is Spring outside, like Magnolia blooming. It is Spring inside me, estrogen bubbling up like a bright prosecco. I will take it! I will take it! Life when it feels soft and possible! Hope when it stops by on her walk! I am comfortable from my place on this side of the Atlantic. There is the forever promise of warmth and birth and buzz, though it is still early. Outside in my city and elsewhere, elsewhere when it is dressing up like what summer might be & summer, when I am heard even when I am silent. I can’t wait to be a sweaty mess. I long for red to be as synonymous w/ blooms as it is w/ wounds.

The reds in my house are warm, welcoming, reds like peppers, reds like Earth. I'm listening again to the Rain Song on a sunny spring day; a song of rain that sounds just like the sun. In my bathroom where I believe in true love (bathrooms see more than other rooms, bathrooms see it all). Here, where we practice taking care.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon stoned w/ my cat and ran to the grocery store three times. River looking for the sun and Mallory running circles around the house, all nervous. Her nervousness, almost cruel - doesn’t recognize her own brother! I split my time between the two, between boy cat and girl cat, between pains of the body and pains of the heart, the aching thing and the nervous thing. My beloved animals made of blood, you are parts of me, I will take care of you the best I can.

I wear my hair overgrown, like maybe the wind styled it today. I am trying to feel as breezy as I dress myself to be, so that when it comes, I will look the part. I curl it around mostly to hide the ends, dead just as the Earth is born again. I'm still growing it out, it looks like shit now but still love, all love. I catch up with my friends today. I catch up with my words today. One thing at a time, abundantly.

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4/19: After too long in the cold, I raise my arms up above my head and stretch like a cartoon bear. It liberates my circulation, opens up my breath. I came straight here after therapy. My cleaning gig has been slow since the hot tub broke a month ago, a little good, a little bad. They got it up and running before the season really starts so now I’m back. I brought my words here and stole some time. I smoked a j by the pool, the cover on and hanging low, like how my snow tires are still on the Soul. I smell like pheromones. I always sweat in therapy. Breeze still cold and trees still bare. I’m feeling resilient, back in the building phase and collecting materials everywhere I go, like ravens’ feathers and cat teeth and money, like the things that Desire makes of me.

A friend calls to tell me she believes in God again, and she can’t explain, can’t say why, but she wants to thank me for it. I shake my head w/ a laugh and all my regrets are lost to the wind. Winter was wet, wet like the year that birthed it. I’ve been dreaming of sand and scorched earth, dry leaves that catch easily. The ground below has been carrying us and we’ve been weighing heavy lately. I feel it, so I imagine you feel it. There is a burning thing about empires, there always has been.

There’s been heavy winds and big words and (The people! The people!) we’ve been holding it all in for decades decades, for centuries centuries. This love thing that we keep in cages. Somehow fear became easier than love to carry. Somehow! I watched it, we watched it happen, we have been watching it for lifetimes. 

We get aggressive in the heat, I’ve noticed, we all do. Restless for an end as if we’d recognize it when we felt it. Carelessness never offers opportunity and everything done in fear is born in fear is grown in fear. Our soil has been poisoned, every fresh new bloom choking on the fumes. This is what fear does. 

I learn sensitivities are what make me an animal, w/ a heart of dirt and blood red guts. I learn to live where there is fresh water nearby. I learn too much sun will kill ya but so will not enough. We all float on the wind to each other, like miracles (yes) like electricity (yes) like ash (yes) OR like electricity until we are ash. W/ our feet on the ground, we touch the whole of the world. Whether we know it or not, we change everything we touch. We can change like that too, so easily, so sweetly, but only through love. And look at that; the sun is coming out and I am choosing love again.

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4/20: I rearranged my talismans in the G room on Monday - shifted, dusted, brought a lime in here, found functionality. I am learning to worship better, for I am a disciple of life, alone. Right now is the first time I’m sitting in communion w/ it. A cat on my lap. Glass of water that I share w/ the gods. Candles lit in the corners. Dirt slowly becoming mud. I don’t have greenery, can’t keep up w/ the jungle but I keep mud. Little bits of earth, making clay out of my city. 

He tells me to stop talking in riddles, in metaphor, in poetry. He doesn’t know it’s the only way I know how to let it out. And look at my words now, shrinking on the page and shaking. That’s how I know I’m getting to the heart of it, when the writing is only vibrations on the page. My heart itself pumping them out like, I know it’s gonna kill me some day. This way I live my life and love and love and love. All the wavy parts of me, held tight, a focused unfocus, like really wading in it, in the muck and the mud / writing small and insane, so it was hard for my mother to read when she would consult the books to find out what was going on w/ her kid. Her kid wanting to tell but not knowing how.

My symbols, my little script of self, like I only know myself this way. My body twisting & shifting into letters, into words on a page. I’ve said it before (in a poem! In a poem!): I am the living code. I haven’t taught anyone the cipher.

a poem about the Vibe

The words are in my knees, shaking while I sit. They went from my head and sat in my cheeks for a while, high like balloons, cheeks I’ve learned to love by looking at Nana Angie, by looking at my family. My words slip and catch up, blockade, somewhere in the throat. Then it’s shaking shoulders, shaking spine, shaking desk on which I write. A familiar ache in my belly and hips, rolling around right here where I sit, riding out the words. In my knees, words sit most restlessly. I send my energy down like I do when I’m standing in the cold for too long. Knees buzz like flies on the river, sending ripples. This heart of mine leaping towards the sun and burrowing back into dirt, where it is safe and dark, safe until rain comes and the mud comes. An ache and a stretch, open open all over again. The beautiful leaping thing that hope is. 

If I didn’t write, I would run and run, ride and ride, never rooting and never hoping to. I know people who do that. I love them so much for it, even from all the way over here. But I come from a family that stays, that sticks close and leans heavy. My family helps carry each other. In youth, easily ashamed, I never wanted to ask for help. In feeling unworthy of all the good I had, I let it go w/out taking stock. I let it go and lived a live of fantasy. I am teaching myself to love responsibility and vulnerability, how to love forgiveness and what the fuck money really is. 

Songs of Saturn, track 1: on SZA’s Good Days & Saturn, free to read for now.

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4/21: I am home at 1 AM, home on high! Slipping in and leaving shreds of me all over, I am strewn about the place! Cowboy boots by the toilet. Jumpsuit stripped before I brush my teeth and hung up w/ the towels as they dry. Unbutton one and two of the silk shirt I wore out and I’m taking it to bed. Upstairs, the moon interrupts the dark and lover sleeps on his back. I’m beginning to think this purple G string is lucky after all. I’m beginning to think there is salvation somewhere.

Isn’t it just easier to find laughter in the mornings where the sun is out and love is brave? A morning after another night in my city, in the West end in a way I haven’t been in a while. Not since it was new to me, when I was more of a seed and less like a stone. Geno’s was bathed in green light and there was a haze in the air. It made you want to lean into the night like cushions, made you want to say some goofy shit, made you want to take off your shirt and pants. My friends and I, showing up for the burlesque show early. We folded dollars into cranes and sent them migrating towards the stage, in flight towards a hotter climate, sequins and sweat.

When I first moved to Portland, I would go to burlesque shows every weekend, sitting on tables, yelping and going broke. I brought T to a few of them - the first, the last, the wedding where even the mother of the bride stripped down to pasties. The scene fractured, or seemed to. The way so many creative communities do, everyone working for themselves at the end of the day. It was right around Covid when the shows became less frequent, people coming, people going. I stopped going a little before then when my life felt unsure, trying to make room for a new dream. I did what I was used to doing back then, making excuses and holding myself up to some idea of perfection, keeping myself away.

Now, it’s 4/20, 2024. I’m meeting my friends at the rock club and smoking on the streets of a city I’ve come to know, come to love. I am a solid, open thing. My friends feeling how family feels, sparking off in all sorts of electric directions over here. We sniff each other out at the venue. We have to be light on our feet. We are loyal, loyal. Everything is just a little unpredictable and we get to be a little more of ourselves.

Tangentially, I am in love and it’s doing something to me. I share parts of you and you share parts of me. The night is breathing in deep and clothes are coming off and the moon is groaning, growing bloated in the sky. When I am sensitive to the night, she fucking sings for me. I am watching the moonflower bloom. Like watching fireworks. Like watching all our nights outlast us. I search my Google drive for the word, alive. It might be my new favorite.

the girls' room / the moonflower / the poster

I pull the shiny parts from last night. I think green light and black leather. I think Nat working at the door and the five and six of us all standing. I think of matching scarves and a full house, big smiles. Red’s fingers in my hair and arms around shoulders and free j’s thrown to the audience. I drooled and danced, cheered and cheered. It was a holiday after all, our young holiday, indulgent in my city.

I think of little fringe waspies, plant-shaped pasties, j’s the size of baseball bats. Dancing on stage has gotta be one of the most empowering things we can do. Brazen and beautiful, inherently inherently / how a jaguar looks at you naked and you hear, watch what I can do.

I think for a while about bodies, our bodies, I have spent my life thinking about bodies. Their glory, their reign, and their hilarity, humanity. Here, I find it so easy to celebrate. Here, where the liberation of difference is set ablaze w/ libido - joy joy joy! An exploration of fantasy and this show’s got everything. Mothers, drug dealers, and drag kings. My friends, my community, my city. And all night, friends telling me I have drag king energy, like I didn’t already know. 

The night gave us elegant ladies in feathered robes doing the ol’ smoking at home and looking delicious bit. Summer Breeze and Purple Haze and Electric Feel. Betty Page reincarnate. The most beautiful, bountiful, bouncing body I’ve ever seen, head of curls and no clothes. Cinnamon Maxxine brought black lights and body paint - and at the end, there was a raffle to win the sheet that lay beneath where she shook and slid. Riot Romero closed the show as a lime green demon, a skull bedazzled on his plastic cock and balls, thrusting to Sweet Leaf and biting the head off of a fake stuffed bat like the Prince of Darkness himself. 

Made of clay, I was moving, mutable, there for the show. There was demon talk and drama that didn’t need to be drama so much as a moment of holding. Intermission was generous, stoned, a stretch. My coat had someone else’s vodka soda all over it by the end, the night blowing us right along. The show ended w/ costume changes and cheers sent up in smoke. I camped out in the tattooed girls’ room where my friends were and where emotion had sprung a leak, a small hole where the water rushes in. 

meme by @lilacblues69

And still, and still, not ready to go home yet. Another puff, another pass. Another bar in the West end w/ red lights and dirty seats. Six and then seven and then six of us. We sit cafeteria style until last call, talking like tossing lassos. I noticed my body language shift from my mother’s to my step-father’s as the night went on. I noticed when I sounded like my father and when I sounded like myself. And my friends, my friends, being here and being there, for them, w/ them, our city, our city, we huddle around the red. I noticed the world trying to tell me something, in little ways like it does, never all at once and never straight forward, never finishing a thought, really. The way I write like the world, in all kinds of directions and so often saying the same thing over and over. I’m just seeing and taking notes, playing in the Here & Now, knowing Truth is inherent in the design. Yes, I’m writing about love again, as it becomes bigger and bigger, somehow more real.

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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