Wishing
5/19: It is right that I’m a few pages in to a new morning pages book and I’m a few days into a new mode of life, unexamined (all the places I wanna go, stories in my body, hands to hold me). It’s right that I’m listening to new music, day to night in the hot and wet. Somehow I find summer at the end of the longest day. I get used to prophesy, I call it when I see it. I am the weather now. I decide where the sun shines in my life. I say, yes w/ my whole heart. I say, OK w/ my hips. I don’t stutter.
I’m looking at so much at once that it’s turning me into something new. I see sex on the billboards and fear in everyone’s eyes, like in that movie. CONSUME is the message. PUNISHMENT is the threat. Bleary-eyed, I see hope flicker in the center of us, in the center of our city, our backs to the wind. Sparks go bouncing off the concrete. I am an animal always hungry and I’m losing my appetite. River eats slow and I eat local. I eat a doughnut while I drive. There are three horses now in the fields by my house. I remember my abandoned poetry, naming one Grace and the other Beginnings. I name this third one Magic. All brunette in the tall grass close to the road.
I believe this summer will leave me different than how it has found me. I am leaning on love - if it’s really everywhere then it will be all I seek out. My hair all overgrown, it goes flat when I shake it around like this, in the humidity and sweat. My shoes are off while I drive and while I dance and while I post up in the passenger seat. I want the sun on my feet. I want a destiny. The wind turns me on, blowing warm this way and that. If you stand close enough, you’ll feel it too. A sensational life in the naked season.
A friend comes over and her hair curls behind her ears in the rain. When we first met, we worked together - smoking j’s in the backseat and on our knees scrubbing floors, our bodies bent and using their weight, all of us feeling a version of the same thing. She inspired me to wear silver again. A summer or two ago, it was J and Al and me every Friday, M was there near the end. It deteriorated quickly, a job w/ such thin boundaries. It was one thing to choose to scrub sinks and toilets and mirrors. It was something else to watch your friends do it, to grow tired and irritated together, to be small and dirty together. I wore sweats on the job and let loose the reins of myself for the first time on the clock.
Yesterday, we were listening to Billie and I said, come over. Al showed up w/ her little coffee and her little car basket. We had lemon cookies. She said she had never had the lemon ones before and I said, no me neither, they’re good, right? I said, M dropped them off the other day when we took the boy home, a little toy for him too, she’s so fucking sweet. We took our coffee on a walk. She rolled no filter, denim coat down to her ankles. She chose left, we went left.
We wandered rambling and kicking stones down streets lush and green. I discovered new routes in the neighborhood, more roots in the ground. She pulled phone from pocket and we learned Oak and Rhododendron and White Lilac. We discovered a new patch of bleeding hearts behind my house, not seen last year or the years before. We talked about our hearts like they were the same kind of thing, different versions of the same muscle, different tempos of the same aches, different iterations of the same hope. It was lighter to carry between the two of us.
When I see my friends again from that last summer or the summer before, it is easy to be honest, easy to laugh, easy to sit close. Our lives all look different than they did back then. But our feelings, our rumblings, they are the same species. Heartbreak and hope well up from unique geysers w/in us but they always bubble to the top in a similar way, a little bit and then all at once.
I sit now on a flat Sunday all gray, at my desk and a bit of a mess. I am a version of free here, like what Sundays are for. Breakfast a little larger, a little later in the day. I find art in the afternoon, a friend’s photographs hanging down the stone walls of the church, one two three. Photos of trees like veins like roots like language on the land. I spend more time w/ the things I care about, today especially. I think of the world and think maybe everyone else is too, in their own way.
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5/20: Overnight, the dandelions die in the yard next to mine and all I see are the wishes I made as a child. Gossamer ghosts like how I first knew hope to look. I make wishes everywhere I go, trusting the wind to blow the petals off when they’re ready. This is how I practice trust, the timing of things. Weeds carry the world’s wishes, soft white in the green, like prayers sent deliciously to the Earth, sacrifices to God. My body, my dirt, mud of Christ.
I am barefoot on the cool stone. I am bare assed on the porch, a sleeve rolled up on a boy’s shirt, hair lifted by the wind. The texture of time is jell-o, our hearts made of dirt. We walk on our feelings every day, layers and layers of our planet, from my city to your city w/ a shake and a rumble. Heartbeats change the terrain, where we stomp and where we dig.
I look at the weather patterns for my city and for my corner of the world w/ its back roads and seacoast. I see the sun blares wide. I think of my friends down the street and my friends in New York and in Montana, in Canada and Spain and North Carolina. We walk in the mud until we fly, until we float. I think of Hometown, NH and the summer of barefoot and bleeding, how it will be fine as long as I can keep on walking. Doctors can’t do anything for broken toes except take your money. You never know how sharp the rocks might be at the bottom but the water makes it hurt less. I walk heavy, wearing down all my shoes. I take them off running, restless, anything to keep stomping feelings underfoot, world changing (all together now!)
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5/21: Pulled from reverie by a rumble, an engine starts. Motorcycle in the yard. T riding into work and more birds flying in. Cardinal in the Oak tree. Ravens on the roof. Robins on the fence. Dead sparrow in the road. A day long and impressionable. Nothing left of my dreams but exhaust.
Keep writing about water like / it will save me, keep writing / about love when I write about / water. I’ve been wanting to feel / weightless again. Until I / remember I can’t be touched / when I am weightless. Are you / wet when you’re wet? I’m / having dreams like Billie has / all blue and drooling. I’m / knockin’ on doors past the / point of too far too far, all / different now. I free myself / every morning, I mean I’ll re / turn to myself tomorrow, in / the sun in the sun where / there is nothing to forgive.
Velvet hangs blue blue down / from the sky and I can’t stay / still. I’m lookin’ up and / moving around, mourning / unlived lives, love stays and / changes forms. We know. / We see it all the time. It / deepens when the rains / come and wash / what we knew of / the world / away.
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5/22: I learn the sun blooms too, overnight. Pollen like ash over it all and my sinus frayed. I am unshakeable, sweating, porous. I am made of hereafter like what luck is made of. Wednesday bisects it all. I am on the world’s time and always in between. Even now - in my thinking, in my writing - I am trying to account for yesterday in the same breath as future / I am standing only in Now, a present w/ just as much heart and hope. The present like a swooning groupie, like I found something to believe in so close to my dreams, like waking life is something in between.
My fantasy lives right here beside me. My fantasy is a part of me, running my mouth like that. In a strange way, restraint has been an unexpected lesson - this thing that guilt gave me, this thing I’ve been pulling apart and toying w/ the last few months. I threw it up in the air and began hunting it. I think of River throwing plastic up in the air, the mouse that M bought, pink and easy to hunt. Someone else’s version of God gave me gold plated guilt. When I turned green, I was free - verdigris. I mean, in a sense I rotted away and in another sense I simply changed and was changed, alchemical. Animals acting like animals.
Now, my restraints grow flowers. My punishments have the pleasure of forever. Seasons of imbalance, seasons of naked relief. Now becomes the seed of future. No one sees it all but the sun. We look down and see the ground as it is now, mostly clay. The air is only what it is ever going to be - the rest feral and temporal. The rest is a dream the Earth is having.
I’m thinking the word parasitic again. I see the ropes pulled tighter, hemp on skin. I see skin and dirt. I am making pleasure last forever in the smallest, incremental ways. I am kafkaesque, turning into myself after all that writhing. On my back, a beetle in the sun, victim to the crunch of life.
I got OK tattooed on my hand for Portland, yes. I got OK tattooed on my hand to make a habit of letting go, of letting go and loving regardless. Pain is right next to love and pleasure is almost never where you think. I feel guilt only when I know better. I’m practicing forgiveness still. I’m finding my gods. I see them everywhere all the time, everywhere all the time. They are imperfect and made of mud, all of us rooting in and growing around each other.
When I found Free St. again, I didn’t feel very free or I felt more like free for the taking, like, I have nothing, I’m yours. I led myself here, quicksand made of money. I find something new to live for all the time, all the time and yet I am worthless. W/out my words, I am worthless. If you feel quick to correct, trust it is you that I am trying to listen to. You hear the controls of the world too, you hear how they talk to us, what they’re trying to do. I hear them say that I am only body and money, only a number, only a consumer, only mother or nothing, only body only body only body only body only body only body only body.
My reality is oozing. Misfiring. I pay to have it fixed, have it looked at, have it fixed, pieces replaced at cost and still a leak. The shop is busy, wants me back in a week. In a week the poison is in the brakes, in the bread, in the water, our dreams all polluted.
When I found Free St. again, I thought of my crossroads and knew where I was going. Dreading and dreaming, I was going. Two shrimp tacos extra pickled onions. I was a beetle stuck on my back when the Wizard found me. In their company, I was on my feet again.
They’re never in the city this early before poetry. I was thinking of you, can’t believe we both washed up onto Free St! We sat outside to orate w/ the clouds, to hear the weather’s opinion. On benches and in the illusory heat before the rain felt ready to fall. This great gift of talking how we talk to each other. When I am asked of hope, I see the people in my life all alight, a lighter lit in an alley, a candle in the cave. I talk to all of them w/ a coin under my tongue like a precious thing, a promise of forever or I pay up, a thing that gives my mouth something to do so I don't interrupt.
The Wizard and I whirled through the city, unbound and looking for maps. Utopia on the brain, a friend behind the bar, so quiet in the late afternoon. We stacked water glasses and found Lincoln’s like it was an after school special, poetry club in the red room. It was crowded and a little more broken than before. It was a theme night, everyone read sexy poems. There was a lot of energy and it had to go somewhere. Body poetry swollen, releasing spores, red pushing past green. Everyone’s unique version of sexy, sound and feel and word choice. Expectations all struck down w/ lighting and something animal to connect us. So much heart in the room. Hallelujah, we found sweetness too!
In the red room, I free my tongue and I free my feet. I am in all the seats. Restraints of will, of focus, of skin. I take my money problems to the bar and I am handed mercy, empty and everything, everything. I take my body on stage w/ me and let my words fall away from me like silk and leather. I know the room sees the dirt of me, the sweat and mess of me, more alive here than I’ve ever been. I grow a different way at night, unshy. I’m in the room w/ you while even the sun looks away.
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5/23: Spring is alive in me today, all yellow and congested. Pollen in my nose trying to take root and I am up all night, all night. I spend Thursday on my back and in my head. I focus on breathing as naturally as the wind blows. When I said I was made of mud, the Earth believed me.
I only come out at night. No guilt today. I keep poems up my skirt and tissues in my pockets. The heat sits w/ me here, on the top floor. I swallow honey half awake. I give up on thinking straight.
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5/24: I swallow my city of salt and pollen. It is Friday, shorts weather, and if I don’t look at my bank account I am living the dream. Everything w/in reach one way or another. I am growing up, on a first name basis w/ my mechanics and digging up art in my city. I learn I like a little salt. I like bitter w/ my sweet. I like longing in my satisfaction. I have no thoughts today of theft, only of kindness, only a kindness hope can provide. For now, it is enough to believe in a better. Better w/ tethers to Now, that better love that Time brings, fruit ripens near the sea.
Last night, I called the Devil back into the city, the devil that the summer makes me. I cooed into the microphone saying precious words in only my way. I let the stand up bass take the lead and I got comfortable quickly, remembering to move my feet and feel out the beat. The band said, G minor? I said, that feels appropriate. There is a rhythm we all make together each newly dark night, you and you and you and me. A Thursday night in my city.
Poetry doesn’t need music but it loves it. There’s so many things I can think of that I want but don’t need. I wish my lover would touch me softer, I wish my work would do more than sustain me, I wish my knees would always carry. Poetry and music dance around each other and Desire sits so close to necessity that knees touch. Ancient things like voice and instrument, art that deepens.
This all came together like nothing at all. I told the The Man in Black, I believe you at Lincoln’s and he asked me to be the first feature. I laid acceptance down like an offering. I was a crow w/ a rock in its beak. The Man in Black got us all in a room a week ago and I kept it a secret. MC and I showed up to Novel to meet Veritas and the Dancer and the Hereafter band. The Man in Black wasn’t present but he had a vision. He had a legacy to leave. Death was busy knocking on his walls. The Man in Black sought us out, a collection of artists like planting new grass. Just in time for peak bloom, Magnolia and Tulips and fresh Basil. The poets. The musicians. The Dancer. We tested our instruments and planned a show on a secret Monday night.
We brought jazz to our darling city. Last night was our first run at it. Through the music, I heard everyone’s words a little clearer, a little more alive. We dug into the groove w/ less fear in the room. I serenaded through the swelling, my sinus puffed like wishes waiting to be made. I drank a McDonald’s sweet tea and imagined honey and my voice came out smooth for those fifteen minutes that I floated over the microphone. Just enough familiar faces, just the right amount of trumpet, just a room filling up in a city finding hope.
The second poet was coming up from NH and she was merry and meditative, something made of sunshine. Red and the Doctor and Char all read w/ the band, as well as a couple poets I had never met and Veritas, our emcee, whose poetry I hadn’t yet heard. The Man in Black read too. He closed out the show, his cane resting against the leather while he leaned onto the mic stand. His legacy was set, for us at least. When the show got out, I let myself be lassoed into conversation, spreading a kind of light around, a kind of contagious hope.
It was warmer under the moon. Five of us went out for pizza under the pink lights. We slid into a booth and talked thoughtless, catching up and catching on. It was warm and we dared to call it summer. Possibility’s favorite time of night. It was fries for the table and sticky floors. We talked firebreathers and funny faces and fears w/ lightness. I pull my friends out of puddles of doubt before it erodes the ground they stand on. I smile even if I disagree and yes, I’m a bit of a brat. But they know this, know it’s harmless, know it’s all love under here. We know we can only see each other so clearly. It was later than I thought when I decided to head home, always later than I think it is.
NOW I am off-leash in my city. I would walk all over if only I could write w/out ever looking down. I haven’t had enough energy to write this week but I trust the life to be worth more than the words. My whole body has been listening lately, overwhelm all yellow and in the air. This picnic table is slouching down Wharf St, a soft erosion towards the sea.
I was working at SPACE for a film tonight, making negronis and waiting on an invite. The feature was of four films imagining queer futures. Fat love and fat art and queens that found proof of self in each other, a film that explored how we diagnose and treat something as fluid as gender, a film of anonymous testimonies from a queer hotline in London. I sat in the dark in a queer theater, doing little in the moment except being kind and paying attention. At the same time, my hours turned into a retirement fund, red penny by red penny.
I kissed T three times this morning before he left for the weekend. He’s camping and I am a dog in my city, chasing my tail and sniffing my way around, listening for a whistle. I parked at the top of Free St. and walked down while blue sky went black and gold. I had a ginger beer in my left hand and j in my right. I crossed paths w/ a man at the bottom who mirrored me all in black, a red bull in his left hand and a cig in his right. He walked like GTA, almost lurking. Feeling aimless and waiting, I followed him. My whims like feathers floated in the sky, something like chaos to lead the way. When he went into 3 Dollar Dewey’s, I split off, flightless in my city. I landed here on Wharf St, trying to find center untethered. On this picnic bench on a rowdy night, beauty is simple and I can be wherever I want. My friends aren’t getting back to me but I don’t want to go home yet. And I won’t but I don’t have to stay here.
I walk off on my own again, my gender flip flops and I am uneven among the brick. I take a loop around where it’s a little quieter. I’m back up Market St under banners and street lights when I decide to call a friend. They cast a spell w/ tears in their throat and I was open.
We were walking together, I held them to my ear. I paced around my city like apartment, I escaped to the yard while everyone was sweating and spilling in the living room. Yellow moon, yellow moon outside my window whistling, not wooing but wistful on a night briefly blue. I climbed rocks and watched the visitors. I wound through a courtyard and found a bar I never noticed before, fragrant blooms on the backside of the hotel and a bench w/ spiral arm rests. I found alleys and artwork in those alleys, lovers and leavers lingering in top shelf doorways.
I put my feet up and talked to my friend like they were simply right here, hearing clearly. We talked about sensitivity the same, here to stay and in all the art we make. They told me about their conviction as it shook. I told them about the films I watched earlier. They said, thank you, seriously. I wasn’t going to ask but I love that you just called. I wished I could call everyone at once, wished it wouldn’t take so long or wished it would take forever. I’m here for a little at a time. I’m here for a long long time. Maybe there is gold in me after all - loyal, like you are worth all of me and I am worth all of you. Loyalty comes not from lack but from abundance.
I carry my friend in my hand as I walk in circles until it is loud again and they have to go, their car stalling somewhere w/ cell service. I remember pain isn’t something that is wholly ours. It is taught or moreso it is demonstrated. It gets tangled quickly, chains inside us that rattle and echo. When we start to heal, we find new rooms inside us and wonder how we walked right on by.
My friend and I live our lives spiderwise in our weavings, in our whimsy, bouquets half dead pulled from our hats like the joke landing too late. The ways we work around ourselves and the ways we work w/ others. That is to say, sensitive and still figuring out what to do. My friend and I and maybe all of us.
I found the hips of my city open on Free St., where she splits from Congress towards the shore. I take a photo of the children’s museum w/ the lights on, next to the art museum. I remember I saw in the Hologram that there are plans to tear the children’s museum down and build something modern, of wood and glass. I drive home and I am dreaming before I even get to bed. In a dream, glasses clink in the center and life comes right towards me.
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5/25: My book opens w/ breakfast and the rush of the last week, little time to write and less time to clean. Saturday the stakes are low and possibility is playful. Whenever T is off camping, he texts me before losing service, says, you would like it out here. He means w/ the moon at her brightest and rivers of velvet, the mountains, the fire, the company. My mom calls to say kind of nothing, sharing half asleep hellos and a story about their boat rope rotting, their anchor left at the bottom of the sea. My home is quiet and facing the sun. It’s memorial day weekend and I keep getting reminders that I should be in the sun or on a boat or spending money, something to cull summer from the cracks in the Earth. I shrug in my corner of sun and sky. This is enough for now.
I follow up w/ the world. I feel like it’s trying to forget about me. I’ll call that freedom today. I won’t overthink it, not when my legs and shoulders deepen in the heat, not while new blossoms are still getting to me. The sun shines and the cats shed and I write at my desk for the first time in a week. There is still a kind of magic in here among the mess. Mallory on my lap, a calm indecisiveness. Expectations fall off my shoulder like spaghetti straps.
Desires learns a kind of carelessness in the summer. Desire is simple now and joy is easy to find, mundane like magic. Death, more gentle. My toes hit rock in the river but pain dilutes in water, in love. I walk still, walk strong, flexing toes in the radiant light of day. My nails are growing again and I have new spots on my body maybe a doctor should take a look at. My skin is too in love w/ the sun this time of year. I carry my cup of coffee room to room, outside and inside and upstairs, and it stays hot. Room temperature set to May June July. I am trying to clear my sinuses still.
Whatever. I’m going out in my yard. I wear a swimsuit all day. I am a little raw from a whispered winter, sweat on my skin like dew in the grass. I don’t care that my house is a mess or that my coffee has bugs in it, it is all holy in the sun.
My head is a clover field, my luck is overgrown. I am thoughtful among bald dandelions, wishes blown out but not dead yet. Out here, I expect to burn, my skin sensitive from being in the shadows. I’ll burn and then I’ll heal and then I’ll tan. This side of the Earth rolls over to find the sun is home and in love w/ the sea, w/ the Oaks and the sand and you and me. Saturday is the only invitation I need.
Airplane overhead, I see you but you don’t see me. I am naked in prayer and you are circling. The sun is the same size for us both. High sun in my wildflower yard - I am small and sweating in a new kind of spotlight. All of us under the stars together but loyal to one. All my silver, all my stories, red next to ivory like tan lines on the body. This body, this morning, temporary as it all is. I am a golden thing blooming up through cobblestones in my city and rooting in, blooming in the dark. I trust that the smell of the world is changing. I trust that luck is something you choose to pick up. I trust we are worth more than a body and part of every body.
Blessings are uneven and abundant. I abandon words at the altar of wishes. I let my body do it all for me. Feelings are reliable only w/ art and magic. A body writhes w/ whims. Songs written in an instant.
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5/26: The sun hasn’t quite settled in my yard yet, but I am topless and grounded and waiting. I’ve been getting carried away w/ some things that aren’t really mine, overinflated and not being very careful. When I close my mouth and adjust my posture, I feel unshakeable and uninteresting. I feel I am mud waiting for the sun to come and dry it out or wildflowers expecting to be stepped on. All this out & about I’ve been doing and eating like shit. Maybe I try to sit on my own for a bit, maybe I experiment again w/ the kind of waiting that feels passively timeless - more lessons in intermediate loneliness.
I don’t want to assume I mean more than I do so I stay on this side of summer until someone sits next to me and takes my hand. This last year of dark brown roots and digging. This last year w/ stability sitting opposite it all on the scale. I used to be untamed and now I am quiet in myself, boring into my city as if it feels me here at all. This weekend, I latched onto invites like something would happen for me. And though there was meaning, and though there was magic, it all had nothing to do w/ me. I wish I could carry myself a little lighter, using the ridiculous words and having more fun.
I went out alone and found a friend, I spent the day w/ them, the thrift pop up and the park and the bus station. J was home from Montana in her linens and Al wasn’t ready to go home yet. We smoked through our indecisiveness and found something to drink that was more like medicine. The party across the street wasn’t for us. We weren’t going to pretend that it could be. It was Saturday night in the West End, cooling off and not fitting in anywhere.
Too grounded and things can’t grow. I start to wonder if I have fun by myself or if I simply try and stay busy to avoid finding out. This morning, I’m back outside in the sun, trying not to breathe the world in too deeply. My spit grows thick. I’m telling my friends, forever, no matter what, laying myself down like I am solid ground. I forget what comes next. Imprints and new shapes and the kind of forgiveness I don’t ask for, the kind I don’t give myself. The blooms are almost done for the season.
I think of my devotion to flames and futility, how I’ve been feeling like I have nothing to say for myself lately. When do we stop feeling like who we are is an unsolvable problem? I can acknowledge and accept and love love love and I can still be an island. I can be made of mud and still catch fire.
I kept my phone too close this weekend. I was trying to invite it all in. Unanswered, my friends still found me in ways unexpected, swinging w/ me through serendipitous days. The sun sits high over the seacoast, distorting time. I fight the fitting in allegations, stepping too certain into territories half-dreamt. Maybe I’m entering another quiet moment, wholly unfinished from the winter, a thing from youth never-ending. Maybe the words will find me like they used to. Maybe my friends will see right through me, not like I am glass but like I am water, like I am flowing, like I have something to offer.
I got home last night to 11:13 on the clock. Two nights in a row. My body makes a wish. When I was new to love, my grade school boyfriend and I would wish on 11:13 instead of 11:11, even our wish-making had to be rebellious. We would wait to reach out until the wish was cast, petals sent out to the night sky. We wanted our own special time, daring impossible possibility. Two nights ago, I wished for good luck and last night, my body didn’t tell me what words it used. I don’t know what it wished for but it felt a little bit like driving w/ the windows down and jumping in the ocean, like an overnight bag and jazz and a kiss in the dark. A wish made in an empty house under TV glow, feeling both at home and misplaced.
I sit now, among the yellow flowers while the world guesses what I am up to. Too many stories in my head that hurt the young parts of me. The morning burns off beneath me. Time and tan lines leave no mystery. Wishes let loose in the air.
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
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