Sweat In the Rainbow City
Sweat In the Rainbow City
June 14 - June 20 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
6/14: I sleep w/ dirty feet and coconut butter skin. I wake w/ milk foam and espresso over ice, forgetting dreams like I have since the sun turned up or since we turned to face her, since T has been working both days and nights and days and nights, since I slipped into time chaotic and circadian. Resisting sleep until I evaporate from body and go where sleeping souls go, reality to reality. Isn’t that me? Last night, I put ginger tea over ice and painted in my strange room. All black outside my window and colors mixed too cool under my warm fringe-trim lamplight.
I watched Joan Baez age and sing and speak directly to the camera. A documentary, a farewell tour, the last of her family to tell the story. I got frustrated when she called herself, too crazy for love, scolding her across time. I watch these things to feel the static of beginnings, to find precedence, to see artists create and change and become themselves. A full room of her archives and all that’s left, what becomes of heartbreak and its mending, what becomes of hoarding the gold of yourself when your life is your art.
Admittedly, I never listened to much Joan Baez - her voice so gentle on the grasses of time. Now, her voice is worn, her vocal range stunted. Joan’s voice was her freedom, her reason and her ego and her unique tool. The way open mouths inspire open doors, letting out the sounds that come from the depth of self, hitting notes higher and beyond, like screaming w/ sweetness, w/ control. Like everything else, what we get the most use out wears out the quickest. Our bodies, I’m not sure what they’re meant for anymore, or what they can endure. Each year I’m a little more doubtful of what they can w/stand. I watch these movies, too, as a kind of exposure therapy for aging and aging unconventionally, though maybe aging and dying makes us all the same in the end. How youth is a detour to eventuality and only love keeps us going.
I watch Joan Baez in her tired body adorned in silver saying, Now is the best season of her life. She is being interviewed in her kitchen. She is being watched and she knows it. I wonder for a while if I believe her, now that she is old and alone. I believe I am 29. I watch Joan Baez at 27 and 30 and 32, married and then divorced, free and then in addiction, standing w/in herself w/ a wolf cut and finished imitating the love she lost, finally writing songs for herself - not for Dylan, not for the war, but to contribute to the timeless beauty of calling out to the world.
I watch to see what rhythms she found in order to try and find my own. I play Dylan this morning and swallow just a little of someone else’s spite. June in harmonica and wailing. Secret smiles on stage.
We all need time to recover from When It Was Good. I am recovering still from the goodness of Now, from the carelessness I once rested in and the generosity extended. In many ways, I am late. In even more ways, I am right on time as long as I keep going.
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6/15: Hey, the sun is out this year!
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6/16: My friend texts me and says, Play is such a yearning now. The sun rises and sets in play. Play takes my city rainbow day into rainbow night, sweet and slow through a new June. Yesterday, blissful and safe and celebratory. I explored again the body of my city, prismatic by the thousands.
When I tell you I felt free, I hope you know what I mean. I hope when you hear love something grows in you. I hope when you hear all you know you are here, too.
Everyone’s rainbow is different. I mean, unique. I mean, I wore clown pants and cowboy boots and a tiny halter and my favorite silk shirt. I forgot underwear but I found the red lens sunglasses from way back when. Red trees, purple sky, and how the Future tends to color the past drippy and romantic. Surreal city, a queer carnival in town and people out to play.
In the afternoon, it was M in the passenger seat of the Soul sweating w/ me while the pop girlies sing, birds in a cage, birds dancing and getting free. We fly familiar roads into town. My friends and I park where we work and where we used to work and where we used to live, neighborhood secrets and stray side streets we learned to trust, a city we are comfortable wandering in. The sun was strong like you wouldn’t believe and it was windy. High drama. M left swirling eyes and noses on poles and electric boxes, eyes on the world as a witness. We sang, I’m drawing on the walllllllls in a taunt. We walked from concrete to dappled light in the grass. Deering Oaks, Pride 2024, jubilant and full of color, of creativity, of community. We sat back to stone at the entrance w/ our eyes wide and wistful. Our friends were here somewhere in the city, a big, wonderful day ahead of us.
There were stages set up, tent after tent, food truck after food truck, families and drag queens and picnics in the park. Joan found us and came running after biking into the city. The three of us drifted through the park like weaving w/ and against the current, like the wind going where it wants, ruffling the feathers of the world, making phone lines bounce and branches shimmy. We heard someone behind us say, think of all the opportunities in your life that you said ‘No’ to. M and I looked at each other w/ raised brows in line for fried dough. We stood silent w/ our answers, sun shining and thankful that this vibrant Saturday was not one of them.
Into the crowds and around, comfortable proximity, tall Oaks providing some cover and a watering hole for children to run wet and joyful under the footbridge. Idyllic in greens and blues, rainbows catching light, fountains of love sprouting from the pit. This was living relief, so much more than a shaky breath out. Inhale exhale easy, alive in a kind of dream. From the park, beams of light over the city and a half moon in the sky. We find love in the in between - the center the center - between past and future, the present all green green and growing growing, how red becomes blue and how we needs you.
The sun turned a corner and the city shook us loose from her hair. We skipped from the park looking for a bite, a bevy, places to go. Joan had a couple photos on display at Novel and we were getting hungry. After, we found the game room, the arcade bar that used to be the music hall, tokens in hand while fans blew hot air around. All life a game. We caught our breath in the waning day, shaking stars from our eyes. We sing only the chorus, stuck in our heads, stuck in our footloose bodies. We show up from the center of ourselves knowing Truth and strength is found in the balance. We keep each other steady.
We go out looking for a place to dance. Al met up w/ us, I found her at her car so she wouldn’t have to walk alone. We got smoky as the sun set, holding white overshirts close to keep some warmth in. We got to Cocktail Mary as a multiplying thing, all the way in the East End, J and Orne catching up. Mary was quiet, no DJ, but we moved our bodies in the purple lights, where the art was nipples on the wall and an anus in spotlight, the disco ball reflecting joy.
While there, the day caught up w/ us at different speeds. Our bodies moved their own ways. Wine glasses, aluminum cups of water, Charlie XCX and 100 gecs and M knowing all the words. My friends, the sexiest things alive. We talked about gallery openings and the promise of sun, of sweetness when we see it, of how everyone is so easy to love.
When it was time to go home, we crawled up the legs of our city and split up around the waist. M and I following the water all the way down. Half delirious, we were given back to ourselves, the two of us showing up and leaving together and laughing into the night. This summer so far has been one of companionship and spying on the future. My eyes were dry while I drove, making all the lights bright and reality a little softer. I love the song that’s playing. I love the company I keep.
Love follows me from sleep to sleep. I wake w/ the rainbow skin of me in the altogether warm and well-loved. I waste my morning w/ these words and my lovable world. I look through the few photos I took and I sit among yellow flowers. The queer hearts are untucking their shirts. There is a breeze the center of us has never felt. It peeks under the silk where we are too afraid to look, tempts to take us with it. We learn what a single button can hold. There is tenderness from the sun as well as from love. My belly burns quickly, womb on vacation, and trends are changing. I am trying something new. I am myself to the last drop.
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6/17: I rolled into Monday twice. Something like midnight when T was home early and I hardly realized I had fallen asleep. Something like 9/9:30, a day flat and warm, wearing the cotton I slept in. Night blushed black and we were back in the underbelly in Bayside, the Wizard, the Rat and I. I glowed and did little else. Said I love you w/ magnet words and left the house comfortable in brown and black.
I go out w/ bells on, animals in my city, Modelo on sticky red leather and checker floors. It had been hot all day, all weekend, but now, the wind was kissed w/ Autumn, cool on the horizon and far far away. The roads faced away from the water. My city looks down from where we stand and sees a belly bloated and gurgling. No toes, no sea front, no shipping containers. We are far from there tonight. OK, about a 25 minute walk but no matter, no matter, feet slip forward in shoes, poems like smoke, scratching all the animals behind the ears.
The show started around 8 at the Aphodian. The release of Lew ii, worth celebrating. Nighttime in the painted bar, purple lights and overlapping rugs and Lake Sebago water, runes on the walls and records for sale. Lew was waiting up front at the end of the hall, like a ticketer in Wonderland. His second zine complete and for sale w/ the first issue and cyanotype tunics and t-shirts. Each zine personalized in pen - pink and purple and green. Mine read, Shouldn’t it all stop working at some point? Well, yes.
Everything on the table was made by hand, poems and pieces of art collected and tossed back into the collective like little mirrors, sea shells in the concrete. The artists awkward on a Sunday, on fathers’ day, on heat wave. I had Lew sign the back of my copy and he signed it from your dad. Lew is in high school still, blowing through this city unstoppable, equal parts shy and bold, budding and brilliant.
The bouncer and emcee was 3 feet tall and 10 years old, little Solomon in a suit, opening the show saying, Hello Hipsters! and pulling the mic of its stem for every introduction. I tried not to look too closely at the audience. I was sitting café style up front w/ my friends. There were children here and grandparents and poets and yocal locals and well, I hadn’t planned on reading but yeah, yeah, I can find something.
A handful of poets from the zine got on stage to share and then the list began, red lights shone up from the base of the stage. Youth, golden and showing up in their city, here and queer and only as certain as they need to be. The Wizard says, Today is Bloomsday after all! The long day of Ulysses. I think of the animatedly annotated copy they gave me that sits yet unread w/ all my other worshiped things. In true, obscure tradition, we dress and perform verse in the strange corners of home. Someone gets on stage and reads of werewolves. Someone sings our city’s imperfect praises. Someone erects Shel Silverstein’s Frozen Dream - right where I left it, in my beginner’s memory. My name, my single letter, skipped accidentally so I closed out the show, red lights hiding a blush. My first time in the room. My first time reading these poems, spitting firecrackers out onto the sidewalk.
In and out of the painted halls of the Aphodian, everyone moving odd and a little unsure, alive at the beginning of something. Ambitious youth, hold on, hold on tightly. We hear you in these painted rooms, our city thirsty for you.
Lew says the next issue will be secrets and I start scheming. Fantasy of anonymity. Lew says, Thank you for coming and please give me more money. Slipping out uphill along electric nerves of my city, slipping back where we came from. I hugged my friends tender and goodbye and the Wizard left a black star in my backseat, in the company of my summer layers and soft remnants of me. A Samick, strong and precious, no shoulder strap, a tiny amp. I promise practice, safe keeping, slow progress below the stars.
I swirl in and around my neighborhood, in no rush to get home to somewhere empty. I would rather sing as the moon keeps half of herself hidden, half listening, a half blind joyride, serenading my Future while the summer climbs. I am in my car singing Joan Baez singing Dylan. The bugs are eating me, eating me, and she is seething. Joan is seething, voice of an angel, heartbroken and full of rage. And shouldn’t she be? Shouldn’t all the angels be heartbroken and full of rage?
This blood that drips from all of us, diamonds and rust. I’m thinking about what haunts me and all the things I thought love was, all that gets squeezed outta me. I’m freaked because I think I’ve finally found it and yes, it’s different but it is lush and green like fullness and yes, it’s been growing for some time now and no, I still don’t think I deserve it but no, that’s not getting in the way anymore. As I said some kind of forever ago, if you love, you are worthy of love.
And God, is there a more beautiful opening verse? A song as sharp as a blade, I feel little cuts like little bug bites coming in from the window. Did I mention I was in my car? In my car in my driveway, garage door open and a house empty, cherries in the passenger seat. It’s beautiful and I’m dressed a little ridiculous but the Wizard gave me an old t-shirt of theirs so I’m wearing it, ivory cotton and this red vest w/ a horse motif, linen and clogs and silver. I was planning on showering tonight - after work, an hour ago - but I wanted to sit a little longer and sing w/ the angels.
I’m a being of love, heartbroken as all beings of love are, heartbroken. Red red rust on metal until it’s eaten away. A hole erodes, lets the water in, leaking in like love, inevitable. This was a problem w/ the Soul the other week so the metaphor is fresh, my favorite kind, the ways life teaches me. Like how every stretch of day is painted different than the one before and how we all become what we love so we must be careful - sometimes sometimes - we can’t always be careful, must also be chaotic and hopeful and ruined, must be the blood that drips, must be expressive and excreting and telling secrets.
The angels were dizzy once too, feeling life do its life thing, rip us away one thing after another; love and its expiration dates. I know better. My guts are strong, red as rubies and just as solid. A little funk isn’t going to put me off (not off love, no, not off love). Any love you’ve felt from me is yours to keep but where I go is up to me. I love from the bugs and bites of me. My dead mane shining, like dead stars, shining; I love from the dead ends of me, from the messiest moans and poems of me.
My body remembers more than I do, the mud of me soggy w/ memory. I hold ice in my mouth and I am myself, out to sea. I crash w/ the best of them, waves and waves of heartbroken hallelujahs! Always carried to the shores of those we love, playing it so cool. My rage is quick like a short match, like squatting mosquito, like long long time ago. Eye to eye is easy. Shoulder to shoulder is better. We face a world of draught, of bullets, of blood, of money money money money money money. I look at my copy of Lew ii next to me in the passenger seat, the pink words that read, Shouldn’t it all stop working at some point?
Yes, and it does. Yes, and we change. Yes, and life goes on running like a river to the bottom of meaning. Yes, our world is flammable and in flames, logs crumbling beneath cities beneath belief. Yes, we find love here, too, much faster when we don’t let go, when the rope reshapes our hands, hot and slipping, when we are changed in the burning thing, when what is right here doesn’t have to be lost when it stops working and instead can be transformed and burning brighter.
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6/18: I had a middle of the morning dream, in between dream, liquid city and a lover that appeared like magic in the night. I had a dream that I was dropping seeds in my city, rappelling down brick walls and spiraling wild w/ easy focus. I’m writing on the walllllllls. Thirsty upon waking, dry mouth at 4 AM, at least I think it was 4 AM, I didn’t look. I never look at the time when I wake up, not if I want to get back to sleep. My lover wasn’t a dream, he’s here now, soundly, sweetly.
Time awakes and I awake and soon it is just my body wrapped in silk. I’m walking in my 80 degree city. It is Tuesday and I know what poems I’ll breathe into the red room but I’m edgy. The sun soothes the sweat of me, silk slinking over my legs. I can’t be nervous, not now, not walking my city. The stage is a kind of home, I know you well, I know you well, I forget myself is all.
I ate dinner late and I only imagined showering last night. I never made it in. I chose vitamins over hot water, chose the inside over the outside, chose the chew and swallow over the lather and rinse. So be this filthy body that gets home late and mutates. Effervescent in the summer like poured into life too quickly, my words are the bubbles of me, foam and popping. My soul swollen in the bottom of your glass. If you’re sweet, you’ll tell me you wouldn’t prefer me any other way. Bite and I burst, lost in a dynamite moment. Fugacious life, made of delicious days, pain that carries us out and love that flushes the skin ripe and red.
When I first wrote this poem, I wrote, fantasizing of a life w/ less love. I changed it to more and back to less then back to more. My words become the silver collar around my throat, the way I predict and prepare myself. I am careful about what I ask for.
When I wrote less I was stuck imagining the cold side of truth. In that small room where I used to write, the light never reached in. There was heavy rain and a parade last year, a parade I missed, already abandoning myself to the storm. I held the glittering dream of me and stole from myself. Stuck inside down deep, as I said in the poem gestating. I was staying safe in a dank space, outgrowing, outgrown. I thought I was being brave when I anticipated losing love, thought I had to choose less love in order to be myself, to become myself in a world murderous and binary (and maybe that's true but maybe less love is better than a lying love, a conditional love, a black hole love). I so often walk in defensive when I'm afraid, it's sets me up to fail. I will no longer be a martyr to joy.
In a year, I have turned to face the sun and the strange of me. It beats down on my city. I find rainbow bars and faithful friends who believe in all possibilities of being. I find rooms of poetry. It is enough to make me feel brave, brave in this new way, this true way, asking for more and giving more, oozing and becoming more, little by little and color by color. The secret sheds a layer in the sun, revealing the softness of self. I realize I don't need to be reborn this way. I can let life turn me new the way it always does, dancing.
✺
6/19: Cicadas in a still morning. The open window lets in the heat. I don't know if my lover is coming or going when he kisses me and maybe I'm still dreaming but I'm going out and coming home when the day is telling secrets to the closing door. Sweet whispers carry me into the next Now and the night chases me all around, seeing me glow like that, like the candles lit by the red lights and the blush on my friends’ cheeks, the way the flash/flash looks on cobblestone streets.
I am all in brown today in a melting world and last night I was bold, blue, beloved. Last night, I sat at the round table in the red room squishing close to friends as the night unwound like a loose thread. The night was caught on a zipper between worlds, tearing and tugging us along. More skin and more serendipity, more poets in the room, more to celebrate. Hill was our host in an ornate jacquard jacket, his lover was visiting from out of town. It was Pride Night for the poets in trysts and leather and biodegradable glitter. M showed up in a short skirt and sat to my right making faces, drawing faces, playing witness. The Wizard sat to my left in a long skirt, a drink and a string of beads. Pens out on the table, I draw a spiral on the top of Red’s hand. It was loud in there - a bunch of Bards were visiting from NH, all on the list and rowdy. They heckled their own, yelling from the back of the room, reading poems crafted w/ a call and response, wreaking havoc. These Bards were fearless, foul mouthed, on fire - a thrilling change of pace as the tide rolled out sleepily.
We heard poems for pride, for identity, for queerness, for forgiveness. We heard the profane and the fecund and the absurd. There were lots of little hums in the red room, humming when there is understanding, beauty and understanding. The Doctor read, I love my poems…it's all coming out so I love it. A Bard said, This one is called Throat Goat 2024. The room yelled to the stage upon request, Read like you fuck, poet! And when the room cleared out it was all too quick. I was saying my goodbyes w/ my hellos and seeing who was left over. The Wizard and Hill and Amour, the Little One and most of the Bards, nothing on our backs but poetry, puff puff into the night.
Once I was outside I just wanted to walk, to linger in the remarkably warm night, to use my time for exploration. These Bards wanted to talk to me, invited me out to their city, yelled at the moon w/ me, adore, adore! We all gave each other shit walking down the street, how some of us learned to love. I followed along for fools’ errands that had nothing to do w/ me - me, a magic, meandering guide who knows all the ways to get back around. It was good to be loud for once, easy to laugh when electric.
All our words sent up to moon, always up to the moon, where else? Something special, like Aren't we? Aren't you? Isn't this something special? Long drives and messy lyric and friends like community following itself. I think it is special, incredibly so. We are who we are, rambling on, spouting bullshit, bating the world. We shine bright on a dark, muggy June night. I don't know who I was entertaining more, the visitors or myself or my city. Maybe everyone was in on it. Even the moon let out a laugh or two.
I led us around, circles and spirals, saying, Let’s go this way actually, this way is more our speed, where the lights are low and we don't have to yell unless we want to, where the windows are dark inlaid into brick and it is quieter. No storefronts, no pop ups, no patios, nothing for sale. Back this way where we trust the glow of the moon and can get back to our conversation, the one about the profane and the sacred and how they're the same thing, the most natural fucking things. I told you we would spiral our way around. I'm intimate w/ the hips of my city. I know how her curves. I'd know that red light anywhere, the red light from the caverns of her and music, music. A saxophone yowling. A bass adding groove. My body knows how many steps down there are, even moreso w/ grass on my breath and friends below, friends sitting in the back of our favorite bar.
The Bards ask, G, what is this place? I say, Look around you. We crane our necks to read the maps on the walls and ceilings. I say, Where in the world do you want to go? I don't stay for their answers. I just want to be here w/ my friends sitting skirt to skirt.
The Wizard saved me a seat at the bar and facilitated an outpouring of love. We've been dreaming together, you remember. And there we were knee to knee, affirming for each other things we thought we might never have or believe but here we are, idiots facing the crowd. The Wizard said, You're doing it, you're creating a beautiful life, like art, like I love you. My friends, sentimental when the sun sets and me too. Our nicknames, we know, are so much more than nicknames. Our words, an eternal flame, one that still flickers and bristles in the wind, one that still needs protecting or plays like it does, one that we can always reach for.
When my heart was so swollen I couldn't sit still, I bounced to the booth where Hill and Amour sat side by side, sharing carrot cake, a few bites saved for me I can’t believe. I sat across from them swinging my feet like a child on a summer swing saying, So happy in my life right now like if I didn't tell someone, maybe it wouldn't be true. My life lately, native metals flecked w/ gold, little surprises that sparkle joyful in the dirt. Here, I say love and you hear me. I have spent years rapt on the hurt of love instead of the unbridled power of it. Now I try to allow complexity, contradiction, nonconformity. Now, I try to allow it brutality. Now, I require depth and reject perfection, require possibility and reject permanence.
A candle flickers on the bar by the red lights. I wear a silk dress in the naked season and I talk w/ the poets like a poet would. Walt is here, behind the bar, working now, putting on humility in an Aquarius t-shirt and eavesdropping though invited in. I say, Happy Father's Day and he says, Miss you guys. The Wizard and I talk secrets. Hill and Amour dance together over their shoulder. The Bards devour, believing the glamor and going home smelling of the sea.
And where is the world now that I'm happy? So close it's under my skin and so far that I am suspended here in a dream in my city. If you're ever in town, I'd like for you to see me like this. My voice belonging to me alone. I want to know what you hear. Like Gabriel said in his poem last night, Somethingsomething brand new episodes of hope.
I want to show you who I've been growing into this whole time (trying, still trying). I want to show you who I get to love and how I get to be loved (something like family after all). I want to show you Portland and what it has given me, what the cobblestones and the poets have given me, what the salt has washed away, what I am sending up to the sky - little stars exploding and ash falling like rain here where no one is looking. I want to talk to you like I talk in my city, believing in love.
See love given freely. See my face blooming and bashful. See me unafraid to smile and unafraid to eat. See me poking through silk and pushing aside velvet curtains. See me lying on the dirty ground and the grass and the streets, the sheets, the beach. See me held up like it is easy after all, easy to love me after all, easy for me to give it right back. Come see what only I could give me in the city that changed it for me.
✺
6/20: A baby in the buff, a baby in the wild, I am a baby ungoverned on soft bed striped in cotton. I take up the full space I am given, feet on the table, cherry bombs to the heart, sideways and kicking in sleep.
The summer asks us to feel safe again, wide open and wet again, to trust our extremes like they're as natural as 90 degree nights in June and fits of rain on scalding sidewalks. It still rains when it needs to and we all go a little crazy when we need to. We drive our city’s streets and we turn when we we need to.
The longer we’re here, the more we know our way around. And hey, it's the same w/ bodies, the same w/ curves and nerves, rolling in and out w/ the tides. We are bodies, we are sand, hot and unattached here, changing shape all the time, fuses running hot.
I love when it gets so hot we hunt release. Ice dripping and conditioned air and anything anything to clear our heads. The kind of heat that tightly holds you. This Earth that will hold us until we can no longer breathe, until we’ll call anything God, ice and sky and cock and anything anything to keep moving. Breath and body melting into mud. Oh, Mother of Earth the wind is hot. Mud, where all sensations of the universe kiss at once, fire air earth water. Mud, where Truth propagates.
Last night, I came home covered in mud from nearly a week of running. I showered deep. The top floor held a cloud of heat hanging heavy, unfit for dreaming. Warmth collected like bubbles on the surface of the sea. I was thinking mostly of humpback whales and that spiral thing they do. Deep belly breathing, walls of bubbles in rhythmic oscillation, spiraling out and finding center. They do this to round up krill from deep below. They do this to hunt.
I turned the tub brown and took my time. I was ready to be home now. All clean and air drying, I sat outside barefoot and breezy as if the sun was still here, just overhead right? But it was dark blue around me. I considered sleeping in my yard somewhere. If T wasn't still working nights, he would have camped w/ me. I consider a lot of things when it's just me and my shadows in the house. Me and my shadows and the cats in the house. I sat last night in a nylon slip w/ the doors open to so many dark corners through time, through space.
I eat a salad in my car. I meet up w/ my friends at the Jewel Box before it rains. MC in black and Red in blue in the window seat. I carried the ginger beer in and toasted their wine glasses while the Future sat its fat ass on the table between us. We sipped, we laughed, we leaned back, our cups met in a toast to One Fucking Day At A Time.
MC asks about dreams and business and the Workshop and I say Yes like a flagpole in the ground, a stone in the river, a paperweight on my dreams to keep them from blowing away.
While I am in the shower, my friends burn the past on the beach, quick and decidedly letting go, mosquitos, flies. I drink in deeply my life as it is. If it weren't for the poets, I think I would have stopped talking altogether. Hell, I almost stopped singing. I think of my friends and how we help each other hold on to what keeps us closer to ourselves, doing it together, making it fun and making time to make fun.
This morning, I woke up as a baby like I imagine we all did. In the afternoon, my lover and I got Vietnamese food and sweat together, cooled off in the grocery store like a date after living in the periphery of one another lately.
We left our sunglasses on at the table. He wore linen and I was still wearing that thin slip over nothing. We shared it all, spicy vinegar and marinated cabbage and seasoned pork between French bread. We came home and he started packing up for a camping trip a few hours North, away for the weekend, too. The day shifted like we were told it would.
The shadows moved in and our eyes lit up. He heard the thunder. I saw the lightning. The rains! A relief after all the dread. Dare I say, We needed this?1 He goes boldly out as the water bucket turns over the edge of the world. Relief! Relief! Pulls me out w/ him, cool blue drops of love on porch and trees. Clouds spit lightning and I inhale as the power flickers, my lover and I renewed.
The humidity doesn't break and neither will we, neither will you. Alive in the naked season, naked in the alive season, shoulder to shoulder and looking out kaleidoscopic.
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
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your stories always feel so real and refreshing. thank you