Adventures in Motherhood

So.

Here are the rules: we're going to talk about this once and only once, and then we're going to forget i mentioned it. kay?

mom is sick. has been for awhile now, and it hadn't bothered me before...but now i'm concerned. i've been here since tuesday, and in that time she's eaten a slice of french toast, half a bowl of soup, couple crackers, one chicken wing, and some corn. today, is when she had the chicken, corn, and toast; my pop says it's the most she's eaten in any one day since thanksgiving. when we read "'twas the night before christmas" before bed, something in my spirit said "this is the last christmas you have with her", and i have yet to shake it. i want to crawl into bed with her like i did once when i was little and hold her, but i know the touching would hurt. she winces when we hug her and hopes we don't see. ok. i lied. i'm not concerned. i'm a little scared.

mm.

Peace Be

Adventures in Argument and Forgiveness

been trying not to dwell. trying to say something that sums up how i feel...been trying not to feel. unsuccessful on all accounts.

well. not dwelling so much. i taught the babies with a smile on my face. i packed. i drove home. i laughed it off when the folks asked where he was. got up this morning. started cooking. said funny things when the sweet potatoes started smoking. played rock band with the baby brother. learned to play mah jong...

...and i know it's only been a few days. but having no real awareness before of how this man has pervaded my life, his very pointed absence is becoming something of a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. i wasn't prepared for it.

mm. i could call him. (yeah, yeah, i know...."you haven't called! *gasp*) but that would take some understanding on my part of the nature of argument and forgiveness. what is a person allowed to say under the umbrella of anger and hurt? i mean...i don't at all pretend to be "blameless" in this situation...but after i've said "i'm sorry" for all that you're angry for, even if you can't offer forgiveness at that point, are you allowed to just froth at the mouth with every hurtful thing you can think of? didn't think so.

....this is the part where i come up with something clever or insightful to tag the post with....not today.

peace be

Adventures in Barnes & Nobles

was at barnes and nobles grading papers on saturday for 4-ish hours. which...in a perfect world means that i was completely productive and all my grading is done...but in this world means that i drank a lot of starbucks and did some journaling.

here's a piece of all that.
---
nowhere near the halfway point of grading, and already i want to tear my hair out with the effort of it..."no babies," i want to say, "'because they look like it' - is nto an acceptable reasoning for congruence. where have you been all week?"

this morning, the ex i'm always writing love poems about sent me a text asking if i was sorry. "no," i say. "there was nothing false about me saying i was suffocating and your greeting this mornign proves it."

i started writing a poem about jeffrey dahmer. it's going to be a love poem i think.

speaking of which...

actually we're not talking about it. if i talk too much i might talk myself out of it. and i've done that once before. twice, depending on how you look at it, but we don't ahve time for that.

what do we have tiem for? let's see:

we have time for daydreams always. here we go:

in a perfect world, me and my closest friends would be at a bonfire on a beach in fiji. there would be poets (because there are always poets) and all the activists whose causes have been won, because why else would we have time for relaxing? no one would have jobs, but it wouldn't matter, because we finally will have tapped into the power of our words, and everything we needed we would make manifest by speaking, or with practice, by thinking. leah would play the guitar. it would remind me of why i believein lvoe at first sight, and i would have learned by then to be frearless. "galumph these nuts" would be an inside joke we'd shout at each other across the flames. my baby sister would love to be alive. our tether to the earth would not be so paper thin and there would be no more need of recklessness. ultimate uno would be the sport of choice, adn i would win 37% of all games. the others, a toss up among the guests.

alright. back to grading.

Adventures with Kholi

...because they write awesome things.
asked her to do something with the ditty i started a few days ago, and she turned it into something awesome. i hope she's not opposed to me posting...but it made me yell out loud in class when i read it...so...it needed to be shared with the rest of the world...or at least the 3 people that read my blog.

As soon as she names it, I will tell you what it is called.

I know the sound a heart
Makes before it knows
It can be broken.
i pay attention.
Listen well. Before it breaks
There is some calm-
A waiting out.
And I know these steps
Seem small to you,
All my ways to rain.

"If you cyan't heah, you will feel," warned my mother.

Remember.

I once cracked space and sky
With smile like thunder
All my laughter erupting
Spilling over into sun and
Down to some valley
Hoping
You might notice
Dreaming
Up the most perfect arching rainbows
Backs bent double-over splitting
Gorging their dreams
Bolstering forth a horizon
Untouched
Less conquered.

I bow at the waist
And neck
And knees
Still.
Pray from a churning gut.
Harness up heaven
And hell
Around each wrist.
Sing so I can protect you
From my siren's song.
I pull as you push.
Think sturdy.
I wink in and spit
To the wind.

I make movement of all that is
With a thing some see as ease.
I swear I do
This
For you.
I sunshine
Crooked smiles above
Cloud cover
Carve jagged lightning out from dark.
I love
Hard.
Need harder.
I am no brilliant pot of something
Ready
To be taken.

I move the storm because
I make it.
You don't hear it coming?
Wait
for it.
The weighted snap.
The inversion.
I love
Hard.
I love
Unfathomable
Like a diamond unfolding
wanting needing
allowing someone else to
push past the coal.

Adventures in Post Traumatic Stress [again]

do not let the softness fool you
clouds cannot hold us up
there are no angels dangling their feet in the air
and i still want to fly
i've seen it done
teeth to the wind
the suspension of skeleton in a tissue-thin sky
there has never been such a crash landing
such a sound
as the dull thudding of hope leaving a body
finally getting all that it wanted
there is a word for this
a desperation
a tenor of static in the pit of a stomach
a cry that will never be tears enough
and there is no goodbye
no angel
no one perched in waiting at the edge of the atmosphere
waiting to carry us home

Peace Be

Adventures in Post Traumatic Stress

mental/emotional health disorders are often so easily brushed aside or explained away as other things....BPD, which usually pops up in the teenage years, is rationalized as teenage moodiness; DID is bad acting; clinical depression is oversensitivity; and so on, and so on...

but even with all that, i have always been dismissive of PTSD as an excuse to mope around and refuse to get over things. you know me - brush off everything that kills as me as being not a big deal - get through the days until i get better....so i figured anyone claiming post traumatic bla bla bla needed to man up and stop complaining.

mm.

a friend of mine recently returned from iraq, and since then had been suffering from crazy flashbacks. some not so bad...others that caused him to have crazy driving mishaps (read: one fender bender and one 3-car-showdown) because he thought he was under fire. today, after an evenful car ride home (read: praise god that i am alive), he ran into his apartment, barricaded himself in the bedroom, and jumped out of the window.

if anyone wants to tell me what to do with that, that would be great

peace be

Adventures in Friendship

Hastily scripted poetry offered as a pseudo-birthday gift to the homie, written in part during end of grade testing, as a precursor to the real gift that is coming.
----

i am already four steps in to a five step plan leading to a life of all beach house
of morning mimosas followed by catnaps and writing these papers for fun
a chef
perfecting made-from-scratch waffles to accompany this afternoon's chicken
and a bride in the corner, with special skill sets, mixing this evening's drinks
this is the vision
clear as a list on a whiteboard
floating in memory as first defense
to your question
here is the answer
i will do as i have been doing

i will appease this promise in the pit of stomach in whatever way i see i fit
namely
i will fall in love again
harder than before if it can be helped
use the heartwood to fuel my hustle
then write enough poems about all of it to catapult me headlong into the fifth and final step

"retire to fucking fiji"

and there will be no guest house
no strangers among us
namely
there will be no regrets

just an open-flamed sunset and handful of poems
as evidence for a life well-spent

Adventures in Reverse Psychology

....i know that we are all tired of the depressive blog posts; so, today i'm going to try a new approach.

Great news guys! I realized today that my life is in utter shambles! :-)

In addition to the normal fun, I awoke to find that I had negative 16 dollars in my bank account, which is great because I'm always looking for real world examples of negative numbers to show my children. I imagined what they might ask. "How do negative numbers occur?"
"Well kids - my impromptu emergency room visit / hospital stay completely wiped out my savings and expendable cash. No problem though - I've already paid my bills, so I should be fine for the month....but surprise, surprise....I FORGOT that I had just enrolled in automatic bill pay for my PREVIOUS stint in the hospital and that stupid loan I had to take out last year....which means overdraft. YAY NEGATIVE NUMBERS!"

No worries. I've already given in to the idea that I might not really be a big girl....and walking everywhere and not eating until the 30th might ease the transition into skinny ho. Woo hoo! And no one really wanted to start taking Depakote again anyway. Who needs it? Not I!

And it gets better!

That brother of mine, who I'm not all that close too, has officially removed me from his life. Apparently, I don't even have to burden myself with his new phone number! How great is that? It's perfect! I'll have more space on my memory card to download a song on, as soon as I fundraise for $1.

Who knew that things could be this amazing?
I am...overwhelmingly excited about what the next few days might bring!

Peace Be

Adventures in the Wake Library

I've taken to spending my Saturdays in the Wake library...exploiting the nearby Starbucks, comfy chairs, and pseudo-intellectual conversations from freshmen just discovering the total liberation that could be available if only we would adopt a more socialist form of government. There's a painting of a tube of toothpaste across from my chair that is so amazing I am tempted to steal it from the wall and have it shipped overseas to my god brother for safe keeping. This is the highlight of my week.

...

I am tired. In addition to the general fatigue that comes along with teaching 13-year-olds how to do algebra, I am tired of just getting through the days. In the way that most of you are familiar with - when you've gotten really good at putting on the face...and even though you can feel it slipping, you lack the energy to do anything at all about it. I spent the morning thinking. Because I know that I can tend toward the melodramatic. But I can say with absolute certainty that to date - this has been the hardest year of my life [sidebar: by year i mean birthday to birthday, not january to december. end sidebar]. And not that any one particular thing has happened that is altogether more tragic than anything that has happened any other year...but the steady stress (stress, pain, loneliness, etc) of it all has been more intense. And I am teaching myself not to be angry...at myself, for never really learning how to face it all by myself. But the lesson is slow.
Very slow. And I am genuinely proud of the friends- all the homies who have fantastic hustle and I'd hate to backtrack on anything they've worked so hard for recently - but I would give anything to rewind a year or two to a time when I felt useful in some way..even if only as the family comedian. In-house poet. Head chicken fryer. Whatever.

And that is a large part of the problem. I let myself become so dependent on one person to be my emotional backbone, and when I lost that...I don't necessarily think I expected to find the same backbone in the family i had left, but I know that it didn't happen. And even now there are only four people in the whole of the world that I want to speak to; three are unavailable of no fault of their own, and the fourth is God - which, should be comforting, but sadly is not.

Mm.

Looking up at the clock now, and I realize that I've been in the library for six hours...watching youtube videos and doing fruitless research. Time to go home. Get on the guitar. Maybe drag a poem out of my throat.

Peace Be

Adventures in Deception

i've decided to stop telling people that i'm a poet. especially people that i'm sleeping with. have slept with. that want to sleep with me. if sleeping of any kind is involved. no disclosing of the poetic tendencies. because once they know...they want you to write poems for them. or worse - they want to write poems for you. worse than that - they want to READ them to you, or make you read them, or some other such thing.

i can't take it.

Adventures in Algebra

Don't know if I've posted this before. If I have...I don't really care....because you need it again. Enjoy

Peace Be

Adventures in Po-e-try

i am a sometimes miracle worker
do not touch me with kid gloves
just rest
watch the angel dust fall from my teeth
and that is not a metaphor
i eat angel food for breakfast
spongecake of a memory soaks me into myself
i stood in this place at least a lifetime ago and willed this poem into existence
stretched my tongue in all directions and said that it would be
and i am
in a word
surviving
all of the things that make life easy
like love, and love, and family
and there is no allegory in alcoholics playing bid whist on sundays over kitchen tables littered with cocaine and crumbs
but there's something in growing up grateful for the moments your grandmother remembers who you are
and i am thankful
for mathematics
and everything holy
like truth stitched in pomegranates on pandora's box
tell me a story
something non-fiction
about the flaws you've found in this fairy tale frenzy
dedicate it to me
and i'll re-write it pretty
because that is what i do
i take things that are ugly and make them beautiful
avalanche out my insides until what's breaking there lays in pieces on the table to puzzle with
i am an alchemist
i make magic from melancholy
like mothers making meals from ketchup and rice
most nights
i come up urgent
until the silence reminds me i'm fragile
like a butterfly wing
or a single snowflake
or a dying child's last prayer
as he stands on the precipice of his new world and remembers the music there
and when he can't
beneath my ribcage is a love without a bottom
help me heartbeat-box him a lullaby to teach him what he's forgotten
this universe
will never miss energy because what matters most will never be lost
though we will always mourn the flesh
and the rest we leave to rain dances
rabbits' feet and old love songs
to circus tricks and patchwork quilts
and rough drafts of finished poems
and i will never again be anyone's second hand good luck charm
but if you need me
i will work wonders
and be a miracle
undone