To Flow or To Go Missing
To Flow or To Go Missing
August 19 - August 26 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
8/19: It will rain again. It will rain again today while the moon is full but lost behind fog. I am whole but I am collecting water to keep from crumbling. I look at the moon like a piece of cake I want to bite into and the moon looks at me like just another star, just another speck, just another puddle of love to sip and spit at w/ the tides. & Hey, can we really claim any more than that? Sometimes magnetic. Sometimes electric. Sometimes the messy red of me and sometimes only brown.
The air in my city is dense like a sweat lodge. Only w/ balance can we bear it. Uneven ground, weather unpredictable. The love we hold melted then, turned to ice and melted again. I rest only as a puddle, fluid as the peak summer days are long.
Airplane overhead, I’m thinking of yellow fruit and the strange space around me, a haunted distance like calloused skin, center still soft. I’m remembering all the reasons I first hardened and I am remembering them w/ love still dripping.
Stupidity and bravery often look the same. Distance and respect often speak the same. I ask to be an exception from a world that assumes the worst. This is something I have worked hard on - assuming the best & meaning no harm. It’s a practice. I fall down my pits like anyone else, like everyone else. I’ve erected cages to keep parts of myself in until the show starts. At our most painted moments of youth, our vision blurs and we glitch. We fumble fearless until we learn it, until fear rattles in our bodies, at the center of us. Our actions from stimuli, our intentions blind at birth. From the womb, I swam vast waters, navigated through, had my experiences just like you. & though you are determined to misunderstand me, I love you.
I make small confessions to myself and the rain comes polka dotted and silent. I’ve watched more and more backs turn while determined to be right. I try to recognize when I am magnetic, electric, awake. I try to tap in. Hope meets from the mountains of me. Sometimes, all I want is someone to turn around. It’s like the seasons, what petals unfurl under what conditions, what dies, eats, is born, is reborn. I listen to the animal of me, capable, on its feet, listening and trusting it’s free, another star lost to fog, another speck happy to be.
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8/20: The blue moon pouts, plays innocent. A brat in the deep blue sky. Lightning last night like a strobe, emotions left to static. Something still secret. Something wet to listen to while we fall asleep. Unknowns on their feet and dancing off at a distance. I hold on to what I do know, like linen pulled up and tucked under my chin in the mornings.
I’m never as alone as I pretend to be. In the morning, its plums and bananas and apricots then work, escaping to the back room. In my head, I am dancing while the world ends. Tears shake right off when I move like this. I shake and shake and they fall and fall and no one asks me a goddamn thing over the music. I’m finally sick of answering questions, hallelujah.
It runs right outta me, everything that got me here, the eye of the storm is winking at me and I feel sick for only a second. I rest for only a second. When lightning hits the earth. The mud of me jumps higher than I could hope. Glory, glory, something so much bigger than me!
A flash every other second and something lost washing up closer, closer. Soon is always right next to you. Today, I avoid the mirrors. I sit where the wind blows in leather, in silk, in humidity, trying to work out how to deal w/ me. In my dreams below the blue moon, I was in a cold world and then a warm one and back again. I was never myself in my dream. I was keeping secrets. In dreams, I am a traitor. Awake, I am so loyal I abandon myself. What is this thing I think I am?
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8/21: The creatures are out looking for me. I make it easy. My own time, precious and sequestered in the glittering jewel of August. My time caught in the last howl in the throat of a dog running, running across Willard Beach after sunset. See me dirty. See me busy. See me loved and lost again, again.
This month, I am reminded my soul chose this body and this body chose Earth. So often finding and forgetting. So often found. So often fumbling. So often, fantasies of sunless days and lighters flicking under jackets, jackets blocking the wind, the wind testing resilience. Our friends’ hands reaching out for cover, protecting the flame. The gold of us that lasts and outlasts body, lives and outlives fantasy, fucks and fucks w/ possible Futures for our leather, for our mud.
I am a mouthpiece that can’t stand the silence around its own words, tastes too quickly the surface of them, says them confidently enough: This is a wig / this is a mask / this is wrong. I can pull myself out like ribbons tied together, eternal and always on edge. My whole life on a precipice of language! It takes some time, some years, but I realize my trip is no longer about the audience, never been about the audience, always been about the spotlight - not its perceived importance but its ferocity.
How every animal knows when it’s being looked at.
Last night, I changed again. The Wizard and I were playing w/ paper, were tearing to shreds, were running late but never late enough to miss the list. We sat in the center, the center, the round table in the red room w/ MC in black and GH (back from CA) and Batiste (back from Europe) and the Doctor sitting close by. It seems no one had time to eat today. Our table crowded w/ refilled glasses and to-go boxes.
It was brat night in black, in green, bumpin’ that x3 in the red room. Everything was brat, even if you didn’t know it. Abundance of nihilism and honesty, shameless in the summer. The poets redefining a small cultural moment, as they have always done. Beer Money was trying to decode w/ humor, his tender heart turning brat pure. A handful of poets getting up on stage, saying, I don’t really know what brat means. Even Benjamine! When they said it, I shouted, Yes, you do, dude, confident in my heckling. We listened on the way over. At the end of the night the Autumn Breeze blew in after working a month of 80-hour weeks. She closed the show w/ a small poem written that night titled, Yes You Do.
The poets and I rode the delirious highs and grounding, plummeting lows w/ our brave friends in the basement bar. August brought in courage like a second wind or just the careful chill we feel now under the door. The Doctor is moving to Arizona, she tells us, before the summer is through. GH too, heading to Asheville as August leans into September. & The Wizard is moving back to the city. My friends w/ their bags packed, leaving room for possibility. They fling their trust on a new land when this coastal city feels too safe, or they simply trust that it will always be here when they turn around.
Our arms stay open in this city. The arms of poets are always open, catching and clinging and choosing love, even if it takes everything they’ve got. Into the night, we talked about this. My friends and I in transition, glimpsing into the future and seeing the branch hold snow, hoping it bends instead of breaks, pressing into our bruises to see new shades of purple. Love makes us capable and hopeful and trusting. We hope to be wrong. We hope to be so fluid that we flood.
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8/22: I consider leaving the Hologram for a third time this year but then I see a meme that reads, MY DREAM JOB IS TO GO MISSING. I laugh that kind of laugh that comes out like a spotlight. Three people ❤ it. Last night, I walked w/ a close friend when the last of the lightning struck a tree on the furthest edge of the city. We walked on opposite sides of a broken heart and came to the same meaning.
Now, the sun swings in through the window and I wonder if my friends can feel it pass through theirs. I wonder who would find me if I did go Missing before I wonder where I could go Missing. I realize I’m still dreaming right now and in my dreams, people’s faces are always so clear, so familiar. Their features shift like a puddle of water or like AI but still known. I think about how, over time, we see all the facial expressions of the ones we love, the full range of movement. Expression is its own animal. In dreams, where we are isn’t clear so much as a certain feeling, color and light and whether or not there is water nearby.
My friend and I walked through dinner, while the night decided on black and everything was still open on Exchange St. I came home both lighter and heavier. I wear my mother’s hoodie. I smoke w/ my father’s god. Then it was Halloween in my dream.
Last night, I saw my parents as friends for the first time, a space beyond time. I saw my Grandma too, for the first time since I was young and pink, all the photos between and the cruel details of Time. She was there in my dream and my parents were there in my dream, a whole family as I hadn’t seen it before. I was waiting on them and waiting on them. They were having fun w/out me. More cruelty. I was mostly irritated and maybe too surprised.
I woke up thinking about what each of us encourages in the people in our lives, what we nurture when we are in relationship, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we intend it or not - not like a puppeteer but like a plaything, or not a plaything but an ecosystem. We know this one. More light, more color, everything on Earth growing up around each other. We share space under the almighty lightbulb in the sky. Sometimes we give and take unevenly. Sometimes what we love doesn’t bring out what we love in us.
Simply, we are what we’ve learned to be. Humans looking, humans digging, humans held by the throat by Time and always looking for something. We made glass that magnifies. We made glass that reflects, and captures, and holds. Who saw the sand and polished it? Our mirrors of obsidian all even now, smooth, do you know what I mean? I think you do - you’re right no matter what.
Today, I wore every color at once, all black today and slinking about. I thought myself dirty, too edgy for my own good. Oh, in time I wish I could promise a smoother shape. The sea finds me and washes over, washes over, how love bedews the skin and how we are so porous. I wait to be a thing that rolls more easily.
I tan like my mother. I tan like my father. I turn darker like my parents do now in separate parts of Florida pretending they’re in some kind of deattached paradise, away from each other and further away from me. They both taught me that love outlasts it all, that forgiveness can be found in every mistake, that we live and love in the long laps of every bad habit. We all wait to see what takes us first and whether it will come from inside of us or outside is just a guess. It was nice to see them smile together, even in a dream. My smile, somehow both of theirs. They smile mindless through meanness, totally unaware in my dream.
I saw something there all black that I slip into now and again. Spotlight spins hard and away and I am left lonely and relieved, also mindless, also misunderstanding. The love I know is edgy, is stubborn. This body has a lot of places for love to hide, like sand in between the dark cracks and coarse corners. I am sorry for how it sometimes hurts to hold me, how I rub until it’s all red. I am at best, a fool and, at worst, unknowingly cruel. The sun turns me to a darker brown. I have been negligent of everything, everything but the sea as she chases me. Someday, I hope to build something. I hope one day to roll smooth along your skin, to feel more like marble and less like concrete.
The volcano erupts while staring at the Ionian Sea and it all goes black, lightning and fast moving lava. I watch it drip down the thighs of the world, burning it all down. I was brown then red then charcoal black. Someone took what they wanted of me, made me into a tool or something useless, useless like art, and I was kept in the world still sharp on the edges, unrefined. My dream job is to flow or to go Missing.
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8/24: Loosestrife loose in the breeze, all purple. When I get home on this sparkling Saturday, the sky is purple too. It is just me and the cats tonight. The magic of today hangs like a canopy over me, up where spiders feast and I, I let myself stay home. It feel like the first time all month that I’ve done that. The maps all torn, future unbound, singing up from the dirt.
I say, Goodnight and I open the window. I let the bonfire in. Friends across the way laughing and the logs of August burn fragrant. Smoke mimics clouds in the dark. Even the crickets are quiet tonight, satisfied.
August leans her head back in a yawn, says, No, I’m not tired. GH & I last night saying the same thing to each other, back and forth, laying back on big rocks. We met up and walked around the edges of the city. We climbed on the pieces that broke off. The moon steady like a lens and all the yachts in the water, the sea sloshing gentle, looking like melted gold, looking like latex. GH is moving at the end of the month and we are already saying, when you come to visit. We leave no room for if. It was colder on the East End, colder by the water. We sat on hard rocks in soft layers. White paint footprints appeared before fading away again and the security cameras distorted us as we passed. We stuck to the train tracks until water. We rested on our city’s gurgling belly, digesting new lives.
Today, I spent my sunshine hours in a room with a perpetually open door. The boom box hooked up to the cassette player, seagulls and no foot traffic, no foot traffic, no one really even knows we're here unless they're here and almost no one really was. The wizard and I in black and white, respectively. They channeled Hamlet on vacation and I wore Patti to the show, slouchy, sweating. Summer thighs and relaxed curls and two boxes of paper printed in the middle of the night, paper folded in the car and cared for, contributed to, promised to our city. We carry an insistent torch towards poetry in a world that gives unevenly, a city saying, A little for us, a little for them, a little art in the city so the tourists talk about it and come back and order $17 dollar cocktails and yeah, tipping is on the ballot.
The wizard and I, we are writing. We are reading. Our mics are plugged in, our presence unrehearsed. A soft launch. A private show. A dry run. I had this idea to apply to the Maine Book Fair a month ago and we were accepted. We opted for the free spot, a performance on the Greene Block. So we had to come up w/ a performance, something - a step towards where we were going anyway, w/ music and jingling bones, wearing something with movement and getting familiar w/ our mics.
We carried our two boxes in the heat and felt it out as we went along. There were a handful of blue shirts in the corner on the young staff, essentially hanging out on the clock. The Owl is here in leather shorts, drawing spirals and showing up to support. This big white room w/ weird couches, one of those media spaces that doesn't feel like they're good for anything but the acoustics are good and there are more outlets lined up along the walls than I’ve ever seen before.
The Wizard's boom box has a post-it note on it w/ pros and cons. The boom box is connected to a cassette player. In the cassette player, Bedknob$ plays B Side first. Like we practiced, or something like it. Like I said, feeling it out, having fun up there. The poems were all printed together but we practiced separately, a few times, a little different each time. Today, no exception. The cassette player rolls out slower than the mouth of the binary code, so our timing is off or just different, just slower, just analogue and we are riddling it off and giggling while the room fills out a little. More ears, more feet, more eyes with curiosity at the start. I flow from stool to foot to making circles around the couches when the Wizard reads, unsure how to take up space in this funny, even room. Hands in pockets and behind my back. At one point I sit on the stool facing the wall only listening, slouchy with a chain. We get paid, shocked, and wander the tiny downtown, buy ourselves some pizza and talk to the Owl about everything up until now.
I like how we sound this way. I'm excited for more, to perform more, to invite in music, to get spooky with it. We've been keeping our hands busy, our mouths busy, our minds busy, we're coughing something up for our city, feathers left behind in flight towards the free air. The wind carries the purple home and my dreams feel as possible as me.
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8/25: Summer is back and I’m so glad. The sun, tricking us w/ the idea of endings when reality is so much smoother than that. We open the windows now on the long drive of life. Through the windshield, the sun zeros in on our knees, on our noses. I take my jeans off on the passenger seat and it feels like I’ve been in this car for a year now (I have, I have, follow along). It was even colder this morning, darker, half asleep and the colors always changing. The sky blinks itself awake and forgets its dreams to darkness. Now is bright and shining w/ that heavy heavy contrast. Highlights on the leaves lay right next to the abyss, shadows we cast on the world behind.
Last night, I had it all figured out but in the sunlight, the details are lost in the fabric, lost in the dirt. It is hot and today, I’m going to the beach to sit shining w/ M like it is only the beginning again, something like May or June. This morning, I am back on my porch writing, sweating, where I go while the weather allows. A spider the size of a crumb drips from my dead ends and I am someone’s home for only a minute. I hook my finger onto silk and return it to soil slowly, to the home we both share.
Last night, I got home and watched the musical episode. My friends were all inviting me out and I was saying, I was out last night, last month, was out all day today. Where were you? I sat for a while w/ the cats on my lap, not going far from this window. My smoke floated out and the smell of someone else’s fire drifted in. I watched the episode that followed where everyone acts as if they hadn’t performed a play in the parking lot and the living room, hadn’t danced in the diner or sang mere inches from each other’s faces. What was all that then? Perhaps, they had sobbed or screamed or said nothing at all. Perhaps night into day is like that too. The water calmer w/ the boats tied off on the docks and less bodies to make infinite ripples out, colliding. The surface darker, reflecting the night sky and telling stories. The day in high contrast and how different her dreams.
I look now from my spot in the shade to see a glittering thread between the 3 sisters. The spiders have found them too. My yard shines the sun back to itself, saying, This is for you, this is all for you! We are born out of the wet wet mud where the world dies to help us grow! I wonder about the magic of missing - someone or something, reaching outside of myself or even outside of my city.
It’s so often we confuse the thing for its symbol, or the symbol for the thing. Sometimes I miss the energy entirely new and sometimes I miss my energy when it bleeds and blends w/ another. When I was young, I confused anxiety for excitement and I followed into a version of myself fearful and feigning tough. I let myself go dark, living that version for a while until I didn’t like much of anything. I’m still learning to forgive a thoughtless, self-preserving mouth while swimming in the melting metal of my mind, while I walk tightropes and step off cliffs and wave my arms all over, while I lose the dirt of me to water and become miry and pliable, while I drink the whole world.
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8/26: Before I go, I’d like to get a little dizzy first, to help me believe in what comes after. When the blood comes, I know it won’t last. Red is reliable. It comes when the silence is stepped on and broken like so many spiraling shells in the sand after the salt smooths our edges and our pores welcome water. It comes after I am passenger side sideways sitting and laughing, laughing like I’d forgotten to, forgotten to when the ties were too tight and the camera panned over.
I’m no longer pretending while the sun is fierce on a Sunday. I don't ever really understand my dreams until I'm explaining them to my best friend on a towel in the sand while she picks Takis out of the bag with chopsticks. I sat writing here exactly yesterday when my belly was hollow and calling out to the sea to fill it. I found M there again when summer was new and imagined at the end. Today, I am free and swollen, pretending weightless in the water, looking at my surroundings as they come full circle.
This time last year, I was just starting to write in the mornings. This is where it has taken me. I sit on the white Adirondack chair w/ a new book and a pen still wet. The pressure has drained from my head to my belly so I am real again. This summer, like stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel. Now it’s starting to get ridiculous, sitting up here for so long. I look down at the world all red and white striped.
Those who had stopped have started looking for me again, shifts changing hands, lights going out. I have seen the whole day from up here from start to finish, all purple as the circle moves perfectly around. I hadn’t noticed how long I had been sat, swinging there on my own, trying to love all these things coming and going in the sky. The world feathered, of land and of sea and me, knowing only fire, only freedom, only air. What has come and what has gone. I have been safe enough for a while lifetime up here, dreaming w/ the sky. I am bored and unforgiving up here, a different color. I want my feet in the mud. I want the lights above me while I dance. I want to live before the world goes home.
At the beach, I walked into water w/out changing my pace, sinking left, sinking right. For once, the Pacific wasn’t too cold for me. For once, I walked into the future w/out hesitation, like the real thing, soaking wet. M met me a little slower further in and we became weightless for a moment, weightless and waitless and wading, green water love clear to the sand.
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).
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