This Was Always My Favorite

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” — Jack Kerouac

Right Hand Path

My gut is burning.

My intestines are in a frying pan

The edges sizzle and the grease sputters.

It’s in my fingertips now and these digits are uncontrollable.

The capsules around my eyes are bursting and the vessels, like roots, are spreading.

My muscles cramp and distort my limbs and I think about what it must look like.

My teeth rear forward and protrude, staggered like an abandoned church organ piano.

Take it all without a word.

Devil, please, find something for these hands to do.

As above, so below.

“Man, I can understand how it might be kinda hard to love a girl like me.”

I need to get away for a while, for a few days. I’d like to go with you but only if you really want to.

Why does everything seem so urgent to me all of the time when I know it’s not? Maybe it’s because it really is.  You know, that running through fields with wide open arms feeling? Don’t you feel that energy, the electricity? It’s the climax in an old blues song when the singer closes their eyes tightly and reaches that note while thinking about him or her. It’s white Christmas lights in soft focus.

I want to go to the ocean side. I want a small cottage where I can sit on the porch and put my feet up on the railing and hold your hand and look at you and know. Will you tell me all of those things with those same eyes that I fell so hard for? That I guess I still fall so hard for. Away from routine, somehow it’s a remedy.

Can I Have My Diploma Now?

I don’t believe in holding anything back. I don’t think that keeping feelings mute is productive or conducive. However, sometimes I wish that I could have sewn my mouth shut. I wish that I could control emotion rather than let it control me. Or, I wish that I could transfer my emotion onto someone else. Can you see what I see?

I wish that I could be that image in the sun. Are there any words left that haven’t been said by someone else? I would write for years if it meant that I could find out and write them down and give them to you because maybe those words would mean something different, maybe they’d really do it for you.

Is escape the only solution? Why do we grow claustrophobic of routine and location? Are humans meant to migrate like so many other animals do? Why do I romanticize anywhere-but-here as a utopian solution? Maybe it is. I don’t get to find that out quite yet.

Such Is Life

Perpetually sitting at home in my party dress.

Feeling Good by Nina Simone

Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel

It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

Fish in the sea you know how I feel
River running free you know how I feel
Blossom on the tree you know how I feel

It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

Dragonfly out in the sun you know what I mean, don’t you know
Butterflies all havin’ fun you know what I mean
Sleep in peace when day is done
That’s what I mean

And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me

Stars when you shine you know how I feel
Scent of the pine you know how I feel
Oh freedom is mine
And I know how I feel

It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life
For me
And I’m feeling good

Okinawa Blonde

Working in retail (or any human-to-human sort of occupation, really) allows you to meet a lot of people. Most of them are annoying but then there are the ones, few and far between, that are actually interesting.

An older blonde woman came into the store one day. By older I really mean elderly but she hid it well under her subtly dyed hair and a sophisticated outfit. Her and I started talking about a bamboo cutting board as a possible wedding gift. From there, she branched out into a story of how she got married quite young and moved over seas to the “Far East,” as she explained it (aka Okinawa, Japan). As her story progressed it made me wonder if elderly people are lonely, maybe they just want someone to talk to, maybe they think that they should share their story for a reason or maybe I am the kind of person who looks like they want to listen.

Anyway, she moved to Okinawa with her husband, a physician, presumably during wartime but I didn’t want to pry. She had a Japanese maid who taught her to use chopsticks and they exchanged lessons in English and Japanese. The imagery was quite lovely because, you see, I could see this older woman with the smart haircut much younger as she spoke.  I could see her with her quite stylish blonde hair in a black maternity dress, as she told me she was pregnant most of her stay, walking around various villages and shopping centers with her Japanese maid. She explained how the maid cooked indigenous foods for her family; they grew to have a warm friendship. The maid stayed with her when she went into labor. When it was time for the blonde American and her husband to leave Okinawa, the maid went to the airportwith them. She started to cry when she told this part to me, causing me to feel rather uncomfortable and therefore, fidget with things on the counter while I listened. They bowed to each other and departed ways. Occasionally they’d write one another until the friendship faded due to distance.

I mean, sure, it’s sort of overly cinematic story and even kind of terrible and slightly inhumane in some ways but that’s the way it was. History is interesting.

Everything Mattered

Sometimes I want to lay in bed all day and sometimes I do. I spend a lot of the time with the covers over my head. This is an attempt to escape the idea of that and it hardly ever works.

It makes me sick to my stomach.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Day 1: Arrived in Buzzards Bay late but just as sunset was approaching. Ate hors d’oeuvres, snuck in between people that were properly dressed for the occasion, unlike us. I like that we are misfits. There was a lot of free beer and a lot of smiles. We sat on the rocks by the water and small black bugs bit us but it was okay, good even. I drove the car home from the bar that night.

Day 2: Attended an interesting aquatic graduation but paid more attention to the cloudy sky, hoping for nicer weather. Escaped immediately and found solace in a tiny shack-like restaurant on the water in Woods Hole. Stared intimately at one another and reminisced about the Carroll Street Cafe; we felt a comparison. Watched a small pool of water with two seals in it for about ten minutes which made me really happy and really sad at the same time. Drove to a place that I’d rather keep a secret and then sat on a relatively private beach for a few hours. Watched a bride get her photograph taken in the distance. I pressed a yellow flower into my journal, the single most thoughtful gift. I rested my head on your lap and then you rested yours on mine. It got colder but I didn’t mind. I would like to put that day into a delicate glass bottle and keep it on a shelf so that I could look at it once in a while. Maybe when I opened it I could feel the same breeze or the weight of your head on my lap.

We fell asleep  in an Italian food induced coma that night on top of expensive leather couches.

Day 3: Drove to my old neighborhood and remembered how it felt to bike to the shore and watch kids jump off of a rusty old bridge but being too scared to do it myself. Explored an old house full of stuff. Literally, just stuff. The rain felt different on my skin because it is different there. All that I could think about was my old house boat. Ate one of my favorite meals at a different shack by the water and thought about how much I love to travel with you. Drove home in the rain, full again, holding hands.

One day I will figure out a way to travel often, despite my income. Just as Atlanta is yellow, Cape Cod is a foggy blue. It’s the kind of blue that I’d like to paint my bedroom. It’s the kind of blue that rolls around at 5 pm.  You can smell this kind of blue.  There is a comfortable familiar feeling in every seaside shack, in the knots in the wood on the docks, in the rocks abused by the ocean for hundreds of years, in the grains of sand that you sit on top of.

Conclusion: Nothing calms me like the ocean and Saturday, June 21, 2009 is when one of my favorite memories was created.

-Thoughts on Cape Cod, June 20-22, 2009.

Allen Ginsberg

Tears

I’m crying all the time now.
I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.
I cried listening to Bach.
I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at the sadness of the middle aged trees.

Happiness exists I feel it.
I cried for my soul, I cried for the world’s soul.
The world has a beautiful soul.
God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson.

Artic, 1956