In wonder
Mystical Realism
Where am I?
Where am I?
I just splashed in
Saunteted in here wet
just to get
a kingly fitting fibbing met
This brave desire to take
Or be taken
In
Line by line
Fiction threads
Entangled in exciting webs
Spun into golden yarn
Now fantasy transports
Delicious delighted scammed
It’s what you get
Unimagined yearning met
Captured
Fantastically converted
Relish
Falling
Captivated
Danced to
Dancing you
Book Club?
or
Strip Club?
It’s that “resume” part of jobbing I wanna elbow the hell aside, punch out then tear past whooping.
I feel myself speed out of the stupor of conformity into the real, whatever it really is.
The thought of that octupussy pandora’s trap makes my skin crawl. That squirmy zombie octopus has a super power possessing shadow side.
It’s designing dangerous and only alive in the insidious way all deadly systems are alive.
It’s, not natural.
It’s not actually alive. And it’s not part of the beauty of the ocean. It’s a monster.
It’s the sweet lost ghosts of distant past I grew out of. Memories. Fantoms meant to predict the future. When they don’t.
It’s the past with it’s claws dug into my future’s neck. It pins down what’s alive and chokes it into zombie hood.
Thee looming boredom of repeating the past hurts my soul’s teeth like scraping them slowly all the way down that familiar chalkboard.
Designing my own restrictions trying to do again what I did well before takes me back to being naughty.
“No go pick me a willow to spank you with.”
You’re seven.
You are supposed to be choosing the stinging green willow branch to whip red marks onto the backs of your bare legs.
This ends as it begins. Like writing a resume.
I’d rather go put on some stipper shoes.
What do I do?
Here I am updating my LinkedIn profile, and back to being twelve.
I feel like my kid-self gushing to my kid sister:
Look what I can do!
See what I just did?
Her forehead wrinkles.
Her eyes drain. She cocks her brow.
Her chin turns up and her mouth turns down.
She looks away. Then turns back with a disinterest and
that tone.
Her and LinkedIn, both.
What have you been doing for the last few years?
Yes. And?
What’s so good about that?
Oh yeah?
So?
So what?
Yeah. But, what’s so good?
LinkedIn’s haughty smug questionnaires are a different kind of third degree.
Why, only that?
That doesn’t answer the question.
From when to when, and what exactly?
How does that add up?
I’m painting myself into a corner. My instinct is to back away from these intimidating forms trying to get me to trim myself down into a formula.
What are your accomplishments?
Even if I had been working at a conventional job for the past few years, I still wouldn’t up-sale my heroic accomplishments like most guys would.
I’d still be down-playing my worth and value like as many woman do.
What have you been doing for the last few years?
Do you really wanna know?
I didn’t think so.
It’s my cracked dilapidated heart that’s been crumbling for two decades. And it’s about my kids.
Years ago their father permanently spirited my two oldest daughters away to Mexico. They were two and four, then. So, they didn’t get to have a mother.
My youngest daughter is with me, but she isn’t with her father or sisters.
That was after my baby son died. e’s okay. But I was never quite.
And here I was year after year trying to compensate for all the love, attention and things, this, my one kid left, has been missing out on. While at the same time, I’ve consistently missed my exiled daughters. Then, of course, there’s that ache where a baby is suppose to be. That doesn’t improve matters.
It’s twenty years later. My two Mexico girls grew up. Without me.
We got in touch, after all these years. They are okay. However, they’re totally convinced that I abandoned them. So, all the abandonment, loneliness, and other miseries they suffered are totally my fault. Every bit of it. I won’t go into just how totally innocent their father is right now.
For my part. Rather than helping this, my one kid left, to focus on growing strong, overcoming, and going after what she needs and and doesn’t have, I focused on protecting her. So, I am pretty responsible for some of the stuff she blames me for.
So, right now, only my son isn’t pissed at me for Mother’s Day.
Now that I recognize my same-old-crap behavior patterns from my shitty-old-relationship, I notice that my kids are on the same direct course to where I’ve been.
It’s terrifying to witness.
Yet.
Do I regret my life?
No.
They probably won’t regret theirs either.
So why not just be happy?
Now.
Already.
Green nice
Let me see
Oh,
Orange!
Show me
Please
Come in
Through
The color of
Fresh squeezed
Fruit
Slow panic
may congeal
Warm trust
Fires up
To become
What’s fluid real
Grinning face
Passionate
Writing
Coffee and Grace
We are going. I’m tramping back and forth squealing through the hall and kitchen I’m so happy. It smells bad in here. Something about beans burning. I don’t know what that bad smell is. Yuck beans. So I don’t care, but it feels all upset in here too. I don’t like it. I race away through the open door into the front yard. The station wagon we are going in is open. I clamber in. We are going!
The big people are carrying things from the house to the car. I sit in the car waiting for it to start moving. It’s supposed to move. I’m ready to go. I didn’t even need to be carried in here. I wait. No one is sitting in the car with me. I hop out and tramp the long way across the yard to the house then back inside, then because I can’t wait to be going, I walk all the way back to the car and get back in. I want the car to start going. I shout bye bye!
No one answers. I sit there wondering why the car is not moving. Its supposed to move. Looking out the windows is not interesting this way.
I’m bored. People bring more stuff to the car, but no one gets in with me or and we don’t start going.
So I wander back into the house into mom’s room to watch her getting ready.
Then, I wake up.
It’s quiet.
I have woken up on the road in a car before. This is not that. Maybe we are already there. I look around. I’m in the same boring place.
I’m alone.
I shout mommy.
No one comes.
I cry. No answer.
I wait and wait. No one is going or coming.
I know what to do. I can reach up to one of those things. The door will open and everyone will be at the other side when I open it. I try. Raising my arms my highest I jump crying with frustration, but can’t reach the door opener thing.
That crying gets me what I want stands till I realize it’s not working. After that I cry for comfort. After that I cry because I can’t help it.
I wake up again. This time everything aches, no one is here, my eyes and head pound. I’m wet cold and I can’t climb up onto the bed. It’s too far up. The floor is cold.
The best thing to do is cry. So I cry. The harder I cry the more my head pounds. I notice this. I cry because my head pounds but crying makes it pound more. So, I stop. Stopping makes me want to scream. I try it. I feel like my had will split. Hiccups hurt. I’m too tired to whimper.
I stop and wonder. Why is no one here? I realize it. No one will ever come again. No one cares.
I wake up. It’s dark. Whimpering hurts my head. I will never trust anyone again.
I wake up. Mom is snuggling me. Something is different. I have never had all her attention before. But I don’t trust her.
She sings Sweet Hour of Prayer to God looking right at me. She sings to me looking right at God. God mom and me. I’ve never felt this. I snuggle closer. Maybe I can trust her.
I get closer by climbing right on top of her belly.
Not up here love. Don’t sit up here. Sit right over here or you might hurt the baby.
I look intently at mom. I won’t get hurt. I won’t fall.
Not you. The baby in here.
The baby is in here. I look at myself. Then look at her pointing.
This baby. In here.
I don’t see any other baby.
You can’t see it yet. It has to come out first.
What baby? Where?
It’s in here. Right here.
I stare and feel confused.
In here there is a baby. You don’t want to sit on it and hurt it do you?
I shake my head then look closer at my mother’s belly and still don’t see any baby.
Get it out.
You can’t get it out. It comes out when it’s ready.
Why not?
It’s not ready yet.
It’s inside you? How does it get out?
A door opens in my stomach and it comes out.
I look all over under her blouse for that door.
What door?
She lifts her blouse. Here. It only opens for babies to come out.
I look for the opener thing. There is no opener.
Does it hurt?
Yeah.
I stare at the smooth skin on my mothers belly. A door. A door here.
How does it open?
I cannot imagine an opening. When my skin cuts open it hurts.
It opens by itself then closes by itself.
How?
I don’t know. It just happens.
The mystery of this completely overwhelms my imagination. I stare at my mothers mysterious belly till she pulls me to her and snuggles me closer next to where the invisible baby is. She glows with delight, and something else I don’t understand but I feel she feels about me and the baby. That’s when wonder sparks.
I’m a baby. I’m the baby.
Mommy how did the baby get in your tummy? And why are you worshipful about an invisible baby when you already have a baby?
I didn’t know how to ask my mom these questions. I didn’t have the words. The asking grew and grew till it filled my being like mixing baking soda and vinegar. It asked itself. My entire body entwined in wonder. I could feel my mother’s ecstasy, that she loved me and was not replacing me with another baby. What then made her so happy about the baby started to fill my being. I feel what she feels. A whole in the sky with a triangle of light shining out of it between her and a man. They created this big hole in something and drew this baby through it.
She glows with the memory, the knowing. I feel her memories her certainty fills me up. Her memories fill me up with angel song. I’m totally content with my clear and wonderful answer.
So that’s why mom is so happy. I feel her delight and triumph. I can feel the wonderful beaming off of her. We are enraptured.
Mystery solved for baby me.
Mystery still for grown up me .
Deprive my soul thingy
Of stories to collect
Of desperate choices
Dangerous encounters
Clashing wills
Dark nights
Triumph of wills
Irreplaceable loss
Implacable spirit
Brocken open hearts
Catalysts story arcs
Unexpected twists
*
People are asses
So diverse
Stunning breathtaking deadly
Acts of God
Just like our mother
Earth
“I don’t understand hate.”
“I will never understand hate.”
“Yeah me either.”
“Just don’t get how people can hurt other people”.
I found this deadly conversation on Facebook by artists authors thought leaders the ones who are entrusted to know better. Sadly our short collective memory blanks out how very close to yesterday back in our church days if you were one of many of the popular American religions you were taught to believe homosexuality led to Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed. A whole two cities devoured by holy flalmes for tolerating that abomination.
It’s all interpreted right there in both Christian and Muslim religion’s holy writings. So, it’s something way different from the catch-all phrase “hate” that is causing so much pain and death discrimination and hurt.
For a minister at least one in this case the one in California to stand up and celebrate someone finally doing God’s will is pretty natural. It’s part of being “right”.
I’m reminding myself that my ancestors and my culture up till now have been violent. We wage justified wars that are still going on. We lynched black folks and have disrespected and rejected “sodomites” for centuries now.
Not long ago it was legit to kill Catholics then in turn Protestants for being Catholic or being Protestant then both killing Muslims. I’m pretty sure my ancestors being faithful and devout men and woman participated in all the holy killings back then because they continued right up to very close to the present being devout and holy killers. Being faithful and devout myself, I thought the “right” half of that crap was all good.
Holy killings. Fighting for whats right. Soldiers for freedom. We still do it. The least we can do is admit we do not understand “hate”. That we are it. Whatever that word has come to mean. We do it. We have been doing it together.
I have. I understand “hate”. I have lived and continue to live hate.
Now I just wonder what I can do about it.
Wonder with me.
“I don’t understand hate”
Hate the euphemism for
All the crap
I didn’t get before
My sugary apathy
Hates back
Life sculps
Transformation
Canyon drops
Sink holes
Towering cliffs
Sixteen foot waves
Deadly venom fangs
Killer deserts that flower
Heroes and psychopaths
Transformation
It stings so I tug at it to get it off. Wailing and whimpering I reach down grab hold of it. It feels like a cat clinging to my butt so I’m trying to shove it down and off, but something feels ominous about doing this. When I do this, meanness happens.
I look up and No is open. I wonder through distracted from the ouch.
It feels good out here. I get to shake the heavy naughty thing off here since no one will stop me or be mad at me anymore. Sucking in and taking small wiggle steps works. It falls to my feet and trips me. The ground comes at me. Wiggling it off my ankles feels better than crying. I get back up. My hands and knees don’t hurt. I don’t cry. No one will come stop me and the ground feels good.
Softness tickles my feet. To wiggle my toes here feels good. I’m feeling relief all over. Then I look around. I’ve never been here before. I don’t know the word for freedom. It just tastes good.
I look far away over the soft and see the hard place. Then across it to a place where nice people will be. The place over there where they will be nice to me. They will be nice to me. I’m going there and never coming back.
When I come to the hard knee hurting place my hands and knees tingle recalling the last time I tried to get away and fell on hard bumpy rocks tripped by holes. This one is smooth dark and shiny.
It won’t trip me. I stand there stareing at it wondering. I won’t fall on the rocks and step in holes burned into my body’s mind from last time I tryed this. I decide. This time I’ll run quick careful without getting hurt. Like when I fell just now and it didn’t hurt. This won’t hurt again. Just cross to over there and and never come back.
I wait for a big noise thing that’s coming to go away. I’m waiting for it. This big noise thing is a light for some reason. It’s taking longer than these take to come and go. It’s not going. The light is here.
It stops. It’s not supposed to stop. This is confusing but I’m going ahead.
Now people are here. But I’m still on my way to the nice people. They talk to me but I tell them I know where I’m going. Then a lady holds out a yummy sounding bag to me. I take some of wht’s in it. It’s good. I try to get more. She moves back so I follow her.
She seems like a nice one. So, I don’t have to go over that hard thing after all. The nice people are here.
I try to tell them they are nice people so I’m coming with them. I know they are nice because they have food they don’t make me do stuff and they are not cross.
Just as I start eating, the mean ones come. They snatch the bag away and give it back to the nice ones.
I protest with all my might. Screams struggles kicks don’t help. I grab for the bag, then when it’s out of reach make a break for the real nice people.
The mean people catch me and hold me against my will. Then they carry me off back to the mean place.
I’m doomed.
Then, suddenly the mean ones talk nice to me and snuggle me.
So I fall asleep hungry, and content.
An epitome
Individual curiosity
Lotteried kill sets
Oaths fall-downs
warped twisted intact
Personality chosen
Sides
Level ups death
Playing me
Like you
Into some being
New
Feast on dreams and verbs
Round glows festivus
Burn your dreams for firewood
Plucked by minds to smell
A dream to bite and chew
Washed the etherial dirt off
shucked
Peeled
Cut into bite size chunks
Chopped
sauteed
The flesh of juicy dreams
Invite your friends to eat
Harvest more from your fertile souls
Surrender bits
For composting
Open window trailing words
Blue chemistry falling views
Gleaming explosions gusts of worlds
Wisps of stillness
Enchantment twirls
Life blows in
Inspirations waves
Smashes hurricane
To the page
“I feel ungrounded. No poems to read. No pictures to ruminate over.” One of my good reader friends complained on May 2 after National Poetry Writing Month NaPoWriMo was over. When I stopped posting.
Hay, NaPoWriMo is over. No more poems for you.
But then, his unease started sinking in and reflecting how I was feeling. I realized. I feel ungrounded too. No picture to create, no poem to wonder into being. My life is off.
Only half of why I write is enough to keep me writing for the rest of my life. To stop writing wondering painting the reasons the wonders is to die. The other half of the reason I write is unrest or energy swirling, mind dust devils curiosity and ravenous hunger to ride to learn to grow to tell stories to inhabit stories.
Postaday on WordPress is still here though NaPoWriMo is over. So even though I can’t get the Postaday badge to stick on here and it seems a little contrived, I need the stucture to write and hope now. A game to ride the beautiful bucking swirling dust devils into ink seahorses to frolic on the page for you. Because I need to.
Weekly Photo Challenge and Weekly Discover Challenge also keep me wondering and going there admiring the world. Admiring the world keeps me close to the wind and tight woven with the magic of gratitude so they enchant this mysterious rodeo.
I hope you have as much fun reading as I do writing. I love the ride. I love you guys.
He makes you
Belive the sun
It shines for you
All night
The crossroads is
It’s true
It is
Just not here from him
To you
Dissapointment compost
Dirt after it rains
The smells it grows
Feeds you from pains
Life Cycle
Somehow knows
To consume the beauty of the moon
Like cheese of light
On bread of quiet
Every night
Is kicking people’s ass in my realm of Memory still human abuse?
I have assigned roles noted characters picked the bad guys in the plot in my mind realm. Since a hero in any story is only as amazing as the anti-hero of a story is vicious, does my inner dialogue need villans? Cuz these stories I play in here feel horribly wonderful.
I control this realm and I wanna do something about horrible people and be fabulous. You know, deal out just what-fors to all the asses living in my mind’s holograph. To rescue myself and put things right.
Is it wrong to beat up evil people, living or dead, in my mind?
Yeah, it’s unhealthy to beat myself up. I get that now. Gotta love yourself. What about everyone else though? The bad guys for example. I don’t gotta love them. Ha!
Are these meanies victims now if I trash them in my mind blame them judge em? Can dead people be victims too? And if not everyone who do I get to beat up on?
I got a story to weave then to replay so I know I’m a decent person. To sence who I am relative to them others. How do I acquire one of these wonderful vicious evil guys so I can be truly great without committing acts of violence and being violent myself, I wonder. How else do I make life interesting.
Is it still wrong to judge and blame historical figures in the privacy of my own personal mind?
Are the really bad people I blame for all the bad stuff happening, you know, so bad I get carte blanch to eww them?
Is blaming and judging them mean or unhealthy? What if they deserve it?
What if I stop?
Then what?
Between the streets
Accross tracks
Specially when magic
Stairs are invol-voked
Taken Takem
In life
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/street/
Notice the lack of additional contrast?
I wonder what this lack of contrast says about the minds of woman in America. Do you?
Please Catagorise US Presidents by Race and Gender
It comes out of nowhere
Just a feeling with some understanding attached
May or may not interpret the knowing well…
Starts anyway
What’s this for?
Ohhhh this works
Whoohoooo!@
“Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It”
@My Waywardspirit
Best way to “fix” a human with zero regard for humanity?
Expose ’em to others just like ’em.
I would say: “That’ll learn em!” if I wasn’t talking about myself.
Warm sweet flash of insight that changed everything: Hmmh…, huh…I am the asshole… Oh. No wonder!
I mean, wonder.
I bet
Being human
Takes practice
Trail and
Holocaust error
Am I
Recycled
Passed
On re-take from
A process
A human
Story-Souling
To make
To tell
To live
To fail
If to be physical is to be gaming
An objective, rules, setting, bounderies
Timed
Not to be gaming is to be god
Play
Life
Through the glass darkly
Delicious wondering
Mystery known
Goes lame
About what the meaning of life the universe and everything else, I wonder if it’s particular to each person.
Then maybe each particular individual variation is a twist in a good story. Since every good story is about conflict of interests and growth from making growing choices then conflict of interests it’s totally a basic high quality story ingredient. So we would story- starve without our differences.
Just for the record. No diversity no story, no Saturday cartoons.
Then there is this other wonder. To just call the other interest, not my own, the guys who want some really no-way things evil could be really dumb or maybe just developmentally at a certain level. Like the ewww girls level. The boys have cooties level. Quite age appropriate even. Maybe part of the meaning of life is that as a cultural being we are age appropriate.
Then, if so, what developmental level in me and my species comes next? What are some of the possible new ingredients for tasty satisfying story foid? Are they an acquired taste like caviar? What do I pay to get them? Where? How? Where do I find a Why and learn to cook it?
Wait, that’s the seed of every new story vegetable. Maybe, it’s for planting.
Would you, if you could, plant and grow a story vegetable garden?
What do healthy home-cooked stories taste like?
Do “my” stories create and add up to my “me”?
Other wonders:
Are there GMO stories?
Organic stories?
Mass stories?
Hydroponic stories?
Poison stories?
Just enough facts to anchor the invisible to reality. Is this all I need?
*wonders*
Wondering: Is storytelling is a game an art a meal? Perhaps the recipie requires some fine story ingredients. You may want a fabulous chef. Mostly does story proceed from the hunger. Formed from desire, from hungry eyes and ears and hearts and wanting to play and taste and feel and be becoming. Or something like that.
Like Runescape, or a sport team you want to be a part and play in it or just to be tied in, for it to matter what happens. People play to lose. People gamble to lose. How I found that out is it’s own story. The life of a story where it goes, how it trips and falls and what it falls into, how that into splashes, oozes smells. What it taste like mixed with blood in it’s mouth. Why it went there in the first place and won’t or can’t turn back. Or why it does or is or is not. What twisted it’s arm into doing That? Here it got cornered. There is the mess from when it totally failed. This is what other stories are telling about it.
Then you mix the two and get a person and their story it is even yummier. When you drop that story and the person into a group it gets even thicker and creamier, more satisfying comfort zero calorie food. Then you spread it out over a culture that bakes it and adds topping information density takes it gourmet.
Stories pop you right into the middle of them to sink or swim and swallow or take on water, or rush crash float spin. Like a player in a game you come out having won or lost. Can’t beat the five-beer feeling of a narrow escaping win. The feeling of your sports team getting creamed lingers the angry mob rousing bitter taste of tragedy in your mouth. Makes desire for sweet dessert of revenge rematch. Persistant hungry wondering of how and who and when that will set the world right and fill Thanksgiving appetite.
Story-Life invisible imagined game character life, might be effecting the actual evolution of life. Nothing is fascinating and delicious like the story of a person. People and stories fascinate. We hunger for this story like for food. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if its stalk story or fast story.
That’s must be why we have outrageously popular thriving Fast-Story chains.
Super-size me!
The answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. I get my own forty-two and it’s free for me just one year from today.
Ask the right questions and 42 will be the answer. Question is, what are the right questions?
Wondering could help with this. That’s what this whole affair is about so I may as well actually do it here. Do it here rather than in my usual paper form. Just for this one countdown.
A Waywardspirit Wondering Countdown to 42.
Yep my own personal answer to Life The Universe and Everything is on it’s Way!
Wonder-up the questions, I will. So when I get the answer to this meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything I may , hopefully, know what the question was.
For the next 365 then (give or take), Waywardspirit will be Wondering to 42.
What did You do that afternoon?
Feel
Act
Wonder
Wander
Remember
Did your figure something?
About you and your life.
About what you love.
About who you are.
How did You respond wherever you where in the world?
What did You do September Eleventh Afternoon?
urgency flashes
a storm of wonder
tripped angling twirls asunder
drank two into three
gives away four
has five more than just before
of six impossible things
unexpected
un-suspecting me
Let the will of the Lord be done unto me…
Don’t bother sweetheart, you don’t have a choice.
This Annunciation transforms Pietà into His Mama Cries in one simple step.
***
Which hat? Choice can go a long way–Raptitude.com
Leonardo Da Vinci Annunciation
Two makes language. Two communicates.
Sad, I thought, when my sister hollered up the stairs: An airplane just crashed right into a building!
I don’t watch news.
Oh, my god! Another airplane just crashed into another building. Just now! Just now!
My mind flips into mode. I don’t react. I ask. What is going on?
My newborn is laying next to me, where I’m reading. I look at my tiny baby asleep safe on our shared bed. I gently snatch my precious two-month-old into my arms head for the stairs and march down with her nestled to my chest. I’m fixen to set to translating this language of two.
What is being said here?
But I lost my brain and train of thought waiting for the firefighters to rescue trapped people form that crash, to evacuate the first building. Two buildings side by side airplane wounded, bleeding smoke.
Tell me people got rescued. Common firefighters get up there already! Get up get out.
It’s about time for an update. Suspense isn’t joking. Are the people out of danger? Like when baby Jessica was in the well. I’m not sure I can stand them in there any longer when my body feels a backbone crushing from the bottom up collapsing me one vertebrae at a time. It disintegrated and went up in a cloud of dust I can’t breathe.
They didn’t have time to get out! They didn’t have time to get out! All those people. All those firefighters. I just commanded them to get in there! They did. They didn’t get out!
They didn’t have time to get out looped my brain.
I rebooted it. It turned to rescue people charred by the other plane. No way such collapse would happen again. It was a fluke. It was only a fluke. People will get rescued this time. This building will hold as buildings do. So get em out.
Get out!
My inner voice shouts. Hurry! It works as much as cheering a team playing a game on tv at making me feel better.
Nothing feels good enough and I can’t just sit here. Scouring the foot of the building hoping to see people come out is almost useless at so far off a screen view. Parched thirst for safety turns desperate like desert heat and blazing sun. The firefighters are in there. That’s no wet enough news. The spot on the ground I’m scrutinizing for exit movement liquefies. The tower squats down, shrinks, disintegrates, plunging my soul with it into a pile of rubble erupting ashes and dust of hope. Nothing makes sense now.
I look down at what I discover in my arms. Future in the baby face nuzzled at my breast vanishes. I can no longer imagine milk ever flowing out for her, again. There is no world now. No world for her to live in.
I ghosted back upstairs, put my sleeping child down in her un-safe spot on the bed, then went to find us some safety in a stillness, a quiet surrender to what is. Letting go of what I think and feel-a hopeless end. A world. Allowing something that just liquified and collapsed to begin to regenerate or reconnect in me, then to my world.
What desperate heart-piercing scream erupts in these two molten crushing voices?
I sit and search, finally melting into the stillness where life is.
Till I’m wretched out of a concentration maintained fragile focus by my sister. Another airplane hit the pentagon!
Goddam! War-cries explode into being inside me. Instead of lighting up with those, I flee to a quiet place to put out the fire and stitch the world back together.
Later the story of the plane down in a field jerks my mind the other way. That one did something to me.
I imagine my people taking out the pilot and going down with the plane. Finally, I don’t feel bound and helpless. My hero’s, my people, succeeded. They did stuff for me. I feel like my fellow citizens and some pretty sacred symbolic place got rescued.
The Brave. The cost! Imagining that person, those people, instantly facing death, trusting each-other, banding together, standing up, thrills me and cancels out the already-in-the-grave feeling of helplessness. At the last-minute choosing to go down with the airplane in a spot were no one else would be hurt, fired up hope again. These are my people! Fiction or not.
Then I thought of the hijacker.
The contrast for him. Alone. Thwarted. Failed. The creeps of failure along with death. The guy or gal who may have, according to the speculation, took that plane down dies a glorious death while even the children on that flight, doomed, where not enslaved and twisted into instruments of more destruction. This is a victory even in death-or something like that. Then I thought this is what really matters to me-to people.
One hijacker had the worst possible death. He died hopeless, a failure, crushed by letting down what he was willing to die to uphold. So, what was he upholding that mattered that much to him, then? What band of brothers did he feel like he betrayed? My emotions settled here, and everything started to make sense. This kid knew when he boarded the plane that he was going to die. He couldn’t chicken out. He couldn’t afford to really see one human being on that plane with him. No person could be more cornered or desperate, and sad. I wept for him. Then, I wept for his fellows.
When memorials were held, I scheduled my own. I’m already feeling like an American about my own American dead. So, I don’t focus there, were everyone else is already showing up. For each memorial, I brought a flower, to take time and felt the grief for each hero of a cause I don’t understand. And for his mother. For a kid compelled to shout-out that blood shrill for help. I don’t understand it. The kid, I figure, really didn’t understand it, either. We are equally lost in the world him and I. He stood for something just like my heroes. He was a person. He died failing, or triumphant. But that wasn’t what I wept for. I wept for the time he passed a beautiful American girl on a New York street and didn’t allow himself to see her beauty and love her, because he might have to kill her. She is them. This is not for me. Bitter tears dripped for the hours he spent at the airport, then on that plane looking at children, babies, couples in love, not seeing this was for him. Not seeing himself in them. I wept for his looking yet not seeing community, only death.
It took me a few years to tell another person after that first person I told. She looked at me like I’d swallowed the devil whole and alive. It doesn’t matter that I don’t agree with Osama Bin Ladin, even if he is not framed, but I let my heart try to hear the people he speaks for, is blasphemy. My position made me shake all over, but I can’t just pretend I feel different.
When Osama may (or may not) have been killed. I take it hard.
Every time the subject or name of Osama has come up for the last decade or so, I handle it by imagining Jesus getting accused. I don’t know anything, but he is my friend because I made a choice to listen to and honor him with my thoughts. I don’t know what he is saying, I’m just listening.
He just got crucified.
While my community celebrates, grief crushes me. I cry on my walk. Grief floods me making lunch, on my way to pick up my kid, while I play Runscape with my online friends, but I don’t talk about it to them. While walking off the feeling of indigence over my country taking-out my friend for me, my walking buddy Lois brings up the politics and his death. A lump grows and grows in my throat choking up tears I can’t hold back.
I lost my imaginary friend, today. Yet the grief is mostly over the idea of celebrating it.
Daily Prompt: Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma
Just our faces
It is only what it is
A chance
To lose
To gain in all-encompassing
Game on a disk inserted
Into a system,
Games end
Discarded in a pile
Scrap-booked old board game
Even Multiplayer Online Adventures
Being strengthens and fades
Connection delighted breach unfriended
Wins defeat perfect moments memories
Communion play lost found
Tulips beauty
Not everything
Touched
Not nothing
Facegifts-flowers
***
Weekly Writing Challenge: Mind the Gap
Nature has no name. Where wooed urgency tumbles into a howling excitement, desire, need, while I stare under a green world with the sky falling into me, and into the water below. New water, big fun water.
Fun gets whispered flowing in inaudible waves that catch and play a melody on my inner tuner. At first, they hadn’t been whispering. Suspicious, they changed their minds. Instantly, I sensed subterfuge and started asking questions.
You are too little. You can’t come. It won’t be fun for you.
They must mean my little brother. I can come. I can tell it will be fun for me.
No one helped me, though, so I helped myself. I did what everyone else was doing.
They told me not to come. I followed them anyway. The pack of them out-ran me fast disappearing far ahead while I am still in the familiar playground of the park in the woods across the street. They leapt like deer one after another into the bushes and disappeared.
They had all been changing into shorts. This was important for some reason. When they said I couldn’t, I proved that I could. I’d gone and done the same. Fishing a pair of shorts, my little brother’s were the first ones I could find, out of the big pile of clean laundry on the couch, where everyone else was getting theirs from. I proudly put them on, without help. I don’t need anyone to help me get dressed, see. Whatever they were going to do, I was coming.
I am wearing shorts I shouted, then screamed after them. My two older sisters, Nicky, she didn’t go to school either, Tosh was old enough to go to school, and Moe, he was already in fourth grade. Then there was my half-brother Ben, and a friend Matt. Moe and Tosh warned me not to follow them.
Stay here.
We were in the usual park across the street, where I played all the time. They warned me not come into the dangers after them. Danger wasn’t stopping me. My little brother didn’t come. He was the little one they were avoiding and not letting come. Not me, though. I am big enough. I headed straight for the trees were I thought I’d last seen them. My world went silent while I kept on going into the unknown.
I might get lost in here forever. Forever started to happen.
Just shy of forever, an intoxicating siren song of squealing roaring, fun, drifted into the silence or the scream of the endless forest. I could navigate by it, jumping over logs, creeping between trees, crawling under low branches squeezing through scratchy walls of pokey bushes.
They said I couldn’t. But I can.
I’m saved from being lost forever, maybe kidnapped by the sight of Ben, Tosh, Nicky, Moe, Trish, and Matt, splashing, laughing squealing shouting tag.
See, I can! I tear up to the edge of the creek shouting.
Surprise, then signs of exasperation turn the air to soup. Every glance up at me, a groan.
You can’t come!
We told you not to!
I’m here! See, I could, too, come. I’m so proud of myself that at first I’m smiling smug, triumphant, standing there, waiting to be accepted, and join the game. The fun stops.
I’m not taking her back, you take her back.
You are the one who couldn’t be quiet.
Well mom told you to take care of the little kids.
You ran too slow.
The nicest of my two big sisters tried to get me to leave back the way I came.
My next sister growled for me to stop ruining all the fun and just go away.
She might get lost, you need to take her back.
She ruins everything. I’m not taking her all the way back.
I’m not going!
Well you can’t swim!
Oh, that is what they are doing-swim. It’s what they were all talking about. That’s what they are doing. I could do that. It looks easy and fun.
I can swim if I want to. You are not my boss!
But you can’t.
Yes I can. I can if I want to.
Tosh splashes Matt and laughs at him. He lunges for her. She is the one who would say get out of here. I expect that.
You’re it!
She turns and tags Nicky. Ben lets Nicky catch up to and tag him, then roars after Moe.
Moe would tag me when he get’s caught, so I’m heading right into the game now. It felt like everyone was just right there, but when I try to join the game, I have to climb straight down a dirt bank as high as I am. I edge up to it and dangle my legs down over the side. It’s scary. But I’m calculating my leap into the water.
No! Moe shouts.
I’m dumbstruck. He is usually sorta nice to me, so him not wanting to play with me hits me where tears are. I start to sob and I can’t stop. Then, all the unfairness of it, the anger of being left out comes up in an epic wave of repressed wails. No one likes me and no one is nice to me fills up my chest with a bursting pain shattering my my body into shaking like I’m crying all over.
Shut up! You are ruining everyone’s fun! Tosh groans.
Ben is still chasing Moe, so he is gone somewhere where I can’t see him. Then he is somewhere else, then somewhere else. He looks at me every time he is somewhere else with a strange face that makes the wailing come harder. Tosh reproaching makes me madder, till I’m screaming uncontrolled at the top of my lungs cuz I don’t know what else to do. I’m almost beat. But I try to slide down and reach the bottom with my feet, but the bottom is water and my feet don’t reach it. I want to jump, but it’s not the ground I’ll land on and it’s high and to scary.
No one will help me, wells up in my chest and erupts in a fresh ear piercing howl of sadness and despair. I see it reflected on their faces.
Someone is gonna find out we are here if she doesn’t be quiet. But, I don’t care. If someone finds out, they will not be so mean, and help me play, too. So, I let my head start to pound with the shouting without letting up.
Matt swims over to the bank were I am. He looks up at me with a different face and says something I can’t hear while I’m screaming my head off.
You want to come swim?
Yes! I stop crying like the sun came out.
You need some help getting in?
Yeah, but no one will help me.
I want to help you.
The soup in the air vanishes, it’s slurped up and a fresh breeze blows through the trees and through the trees in me.
He comes close to the bank and looks up at me. Can you jump? I’ll catch you. His head disappears under water then bobs back up.
Where did you go?
Moe stops and gets caught. She doesn’t know how to swim!
I can to jump! It scars me, but I’ll do it, I’m thinking. But where did Matt just go?
Why do you keep going somewhere?
My feet don’t touch the bottom here. I have to swim to not go down. I can catch you, but if you can’t swim then you might go down and not come back up.
I thought of Moe disappearing then coming up somewhere else. I’d do that.
I’ll do what Moe is doing.
Do you know how to swim?
I think so.
Have you swam before?
No.
Oh, then I better not bring you down here. Your mom would be really mad at me if you went and drown.
What is drown?
It’s when you go down but don’t come back up.
I thought about Moe going down and I wonder about where he is, and wonder and wonder cuz he doesn’t come back up.
But I will come back up. Why wouldn’t I?
Well you have to know how to do it. If you never did it before, you don’t know how and you will go down and not know how to come back up.
Oh.
If that happened, you mom would be real sad. She would never see you again.
My mom would be sad if I were to go down and never come up?
The idea struck me. Mom would be sad if I went down and didn’t come back up?
Are you sure she would be sad?
Yes, I’m sure. She would be so sad and real mad at me.
The idea felt like a miracle bloom. I’d never even Imagined mom would be sad if I never came back.
Oh, and I sat down at the edge of the drop off, happily watching my family wade and swim, totally content that mom would be sad if I drowned.
A deep contented satisfaction filled my chest growing till it moves outside of me all around me filling the creek and the water. Watching everyone who would take me across the water but didn’t do it so I wouldn’t go down and not ever come back up, and that mom would be sad if that happened to me and she never saw me again, felt fine. It was nice. Since they couldn’t carry me across but wanted to, that means they did want me playing with them. And all we needed was a bridge.
Bliss erupted! Out of it shot a bridge. A bridge appeared right in the middle of the swimming hole. I leap onto it run across like a deer hop off then splash into the shallows on the gravely beach on the other side. I feel myself swimming, laughing in a paradise of cool water like the creek over near the park, but lots more and fun, and I dip and duck under and splash my sisters.
A deafening sound blows me off my balance, turning my mind blank. I don’t know what happened. When I open my eyes everyone stopped playing and stared shocked out of their minds. I look up at the difference everyone is staring at.
The tree that had been to my right and just behing me, lay right across the middle of the pool.
Blinking, I stare at it. Then follow the length with my eyes. It goes to the other side where feeling like I’m playing.
Oh! My bridge! Yay! I think, leaping up onto it and skip like a deer to the other side, hop off, and dash to the water.
Wow, you are brave. Ben stares at me with a face I don’t understand. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere close to that thing. It almost landed on us.
Why? It’s all right. It’s my bridge!
I am four.
Daily Prompt: The Natural World
natura morta (Photo credit: Circolo d’Arti)Become immortal
Drink it
Tried that last time
Oops I died
Game over
Re-group
Re-design
My Earth-Game-Plan
Gather more supplies
Wait for the team
Return
Start over
Damn
My character falls
For it
Hoping like hell
I won’t have fell
This time
Messing up my glorious
Virtual-reality-
Multi-player-adventure-game
Again
Still mortal?
Yes!
Onward!
Fun
To
Quest Complete!
“You’ve imbibed a special potion that makes you immortal.
Now that you’ve got forever, what changes will you make in your life?
How will you live life differently, knowing you’ll always be around to be accountable for your actions?”
Daily Prompt: No Longer A Mere Mortal
“I can’t believe I still have to stand here and hold this sign!” Woman supporting filibuster outside Texas Capital.
So I can take a pill to take back my period.
“Being gay is not a choice, but being a bigot is.” I instantly re-tweeted from God@thetweetofgod. It’s funny, not true.
Took me a while to figure out how it’s not true, but like art which is not true, it points to truth. Like the Pietà, Michelangelo’s sculpture that shows Mary the mother of Jesus strong and tall while her crucified son is like a child in her arms. Not necessarily true proportions, just true about a mother’s heart.
I don’t believe being a bigot is a choice. It’s not a permanent state of being, either. Gay is permanent, judging from my straight perspective, though I might be off. But bigot is like pregnant. It’s a state. It may or may not be a choice. It can and will, usually, end. It’s story and outcome are what epic is made of. Plenty of bigotry ends in abortion. Other bigotry ends with new life. Bigotry, yes, is human. Mine and yours. It’s a place on a journey, a grade in school, an incomplete quest. What we do with it may become art.
High school kid calls fifth-grader stupid.
Well, she don’t know The Grapes of Wrath isn’t fruit!
Art doesn’t make sense, it helps me make sense-of people.
This “Yes-we-are-allowed-to-end-a-relationship-before-it-bigins-filibuster is pregnant.
Art is being made here. Bigotry is a shiny material.
Inspired history feels like community committed art. HIstory is being made here.
Could making history be making art?
“Evil” is permanently banned from usage. It’s the way we use it that sucks.
Not ban the word evil. Just its use, its interpretation.
The word “evil” is a cop-out.
Daily Prompt: If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
Young Helen Keller is evil in our current interpretation. Anyone who can’t see, hear and so, speak human, and therefore acts in an incomprehensible way, terrifying, terrified and violent and we feel we can do nothing to stop it qualifies as “evil”.
Evil is where communication failed. Evil is an un-touched child in a grown-up body. Evil is an impossible extreme were only an Anne Sullivan destined to attempt the impossible finds purpose and fulfillment and something priceless.
Yet, once the magic word “evil” gets applied, challenge extinguished. You don’t have to stretch, work hard, grow, come to understand or be accountable for your actions toward anything tagged “evil”. You can do the same things “Evil” did or does without becoming “evil” yourself. It works, I promise. It’s a game of tag. It’s a magic bullet. It is the most useless word for getting any peace and happiness, except for in the form of entertainment. Movies and stories of “good” vs “evil” are fun.
If you want action-adventure, to fight and be right and win, if you want to use the essential word “evil” to set up this story-game, set it in Middle Earth, a galaxy far far away, or The Matrix. There is no place for this word among human beings in this realm. Here, when tempted to label any person “evil”, consider it a sign of ignorance. Maybe it’s a moment to reconsider what you believe and an opportunity to connect a Helen Keller with her Anne Sullivan. It may become a heart warming story. And perhaps, only the one right person may be the answer.
Failure to see the truth and find the right solution and connection does not equal “evil”. It just makes a mess like failure to find the solution that works in any other kind of problem. It’s just an unfinished adventure story, success story. When you see “evil”, you are on that exciting catalyst dilemma part of the story where you can’t see the truth yet. It’s one of the best parts of any great story, though it’s challenging. If you tag it “evil”, there is no adventure, no story, no growth, no fun for your superhero. And you become what you see. By seeing “evil”, you become the antagonist. Have fun being the antagonist while thinking you are the hero.
“Evil”, like “sodomite” is a magic bullet irrelevant interpretation of a word. It only works like “Tag! You’re it!”, or normal people transforming into Agents when they see “evil” , if you are playing tag or plugged into the matrix.
Possible interpretations for the word evil:
I tried everything and failed.
I don’t know were to find the person who has got the medicine for this.
I don’t understand this person/problem. Can someone else f-ing figure this out?
That is an “evil” person, project problem, we need an Einstein.
No satisfactory solution or balance has ever been achieved here, yet.
It seems impossible, but since it needs to get done, it is possible.
WTF! I am so not the person for this issue!
Help!
Evil
I know there are lots of other options, just can’t think of them just now.
Daily Post: If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
You know, it only looks like they can work. But they can’t. They are missing something it takes to get a job and work.
They lost all self-esteem. It was amputated. They are doing what they can with what they got. You can’t get a job without some self-esteem and they don’t have any at all. They are doing what they can do without it.
That beggar looks perfectly good to work. That’s what we think. But begging is what they can do. So they do it.
Get a job! I’m not giving them one penny.
My sister voice acts, while rummaging for her purse in the back seat. On our way to Bikram Yoga, she finds it, takes out her wallet pulls out two dollars, rolls down the window then wishes the young woman with the sign a good day with it.
You know, I just learned this. I figured it out from a pattern in the suicidal vets I interview.
It’s a pattern. He grew a conscience. The pain he saw or caused or aided and abetted, wasn’t justified after all. He quite buying into “it was the right thing to do”. I was just following orders, just doing my job, does not cover him anymore.
I killed those people, hurt that man. The right thing to do for America and liberty, I don’t believe it anymore. They are dead. I can’t bring them back. I am that person, a person who can and did do it.
It’s becoming a post-facto murderer, a murderer with a conscience. It’s becoming a monster. It’s taking responsibility. It is a total loss of dignity and self-esteem. It is suddenly discovering “I am a Hitler”.
Sudden, or bit by bit, a feeling of being just like, no different from Hitler, while feeling total disgust for him, is self-esteem apocalypse. Got a few million people horrendously executed, now you realize it wasn’t for liberty and justice, or to make the world a better place. You weren’t doing your duty ridding your country of monsters, lice, mosquitoes, terrorists, roaches, and child molesters, and making it safe. One or many dying human faces, has the same effect.
No, it was not for a just cause. I killed innocent, men woman and children, for nothing.
It was a mistake.
I did it.
Now where do I go from here? That wouldn’t even be a question.
There is nowhere to go.
Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge The World Through Your Eyes
The handsome strangers whipped the towns people into a frenzy, a witch-burning riot for blood-relief extasy. They just had to take them. They had to have them now. You know, like a mosh pit out there, no one willing to take no for an answer. There was no security and no manners.
Bring them out that we may “know” them!
The mob of rioters surrounding the house didn’t chant “please”.
The towns people broke down the door to get at and gang-rape the two fine men.
These irresistible men where Lot’s house guests. Lot helped his fabulous angel friends make a Hollywood escape. Then, he had to get the hell out of there before the town lynched or raped him instead. Probably just lynch actually, he wasn’t that hot.
The townships were Sodom and Gomorrah. Both towns got nuked for their wicked behavior that day.
The one and only problem here is the town-mob not gang-raping women. That’s why sodomy means gay. So, gay is really bad. Like Sodom and Gomorrah fire from heaven bad.
Mommy, does a fake smile count?
Hypocrisy, fake smile, self-righteous, were words mother said in a tone that told me she is right, and fake smilers are exceedingly wicked.
Wasn’t sure what all that meant, but I couldn’t stop wondering about this song we sang, and fake smiles:
My mother told me something
Every boy and girl should know
It’s all about the devil
We learn to hate him so
Let the sunshine in
Face it with a grin
Smilers never lose
And frowners never win
Let the sunshine in
Face it with a grin
Open up your heart
And let the sunshine in
So do hypocrite fake smiles always win, too, mommy?
This baffled my mother, at first. Mostly cuz six was to young for the nuances of good and evil. First she ignored me. Then suddenly she froze, gave me a bewildered look, while invisible wheels churned light into her eyes.
She stopped writing, put down the pen, stopped eyeing the phone, sat down. Then she beckoned me to her, pulled up a chair for me, waited for me to sit down then paused before she focused her passionate attention on me, for a solemn inner circle grown up talk. She captivated me with the sacred duty of the righteous and temptation and lies and evil. I listened rapped about the cunning of the devil, his fake smiles, and his cruel war on God and His people.
By the end of this intimate time capsule I know who is good, who is bad. Bristling, I brandished my inner hero’s sword eager to vanquish all the wicked once and for all. Point me in the right direction. I feel incensed. I will stop children suffering, persecution of the innocent. I’d assassinate Hitler myself, if I could, but I’ll settle for the next devil’s servant. Why didn’t a hero assassinate Hitler once and for all and save millions of lives? It couldn’t have been that hard! These new bad guys are worse than Hitler though, because they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, with beguiling fake smiles. I want to single-handed take out all these villans. I know the Bible stories and now I know who the bad guys are here and now, same as the Bible wicked. I know who and where they are and can’t wait to get at them. All hypocrites, acting like they are the good guys of course.
I was smart enough to notice that the song’s smilers might not include hypocritical ones. So I was pretty smart. But not bright enough to see the God/Devil frame of reference for what it just might be, a gaming structure. I totally bought into it.
Jumping on the trampoline with my daughter in this cool spring Texas sunshine and feeling like a kid, laughing I bust out singing a sunshine song. This particular one. I hadn’t even remembered this song in ages and ages, but when I sang it aloud to my daughter, to my horror, I found myself recommending hate as a way of life.
Hey, I was reaching for sunshine not a road to holocaust, here. This song is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. No wonder I keep ranting about good and evil, God™ as trademarkable, and the devil as arbitrary and customizable to our needs and prejudice. This kind of rubbish is stuck in here somewhere. My mind hadn’t tagged this ditty as b.s. yet. I wonder how much other rubbish is in here un-sorted, not hazard yellow corded , not yet trashed. My un-tamed poisoned frame of reference is dangerous.
This one has vicious fangs, hiding somewhere in my brain filed under “sunshine” and “open up your heart”. An invisible place holder, lurking here, the sheep clad wolf in my mind. It’s a given by this conditioning that it’s my job as a good little girl, and citizen, to hate the Devil and vanquish evil.
Now all I need to do is just fill in the blanks with Evil’s description. Pick one. Or choose your favorite not mentioned here: Jews, Indians, witch, terrorist, religious fanatic, heathen, unbeliever, Philistine, homosexual, evil person, Muslim, American, apostate, criminal, negro, _______ … I should by truth and right bring just punishment to whichever my upbringing tells me to fill in the blanks with. It’s my right and duty. It’s the heroic thing to do.
Not to long ago, Jews filled in the blank for almost the entire world, not just Germany, like we choose to remember. For our joy in Western shows and cowboys and Indians, Indians rightly filled in the just-kill-em-slaught, of evil. Evidently, somewhere I must still have a lynch em, exterminate em, and the world will be better for it, slaught. Who will I fancy to fill my free slaught with next? Give me the right propaganda and I’ll give you my slaught to fill. Then I’ll support exterminating whomever is put in my evil= ________ slaught.
“God”, good guys = ___________ , must be a blank slaught, too. What if it is a place-holder that could work the same way as the devil place-holder? Rather like any game with rivals. It takes at least two to play any exciting sport. Yeah, I want the game. I like games, too. But I don’t have to hate the kids playing for the other team. Do I?
They know they are the good guys and I am the bad guys, just as sure as I know what I know. They are just as committed to good, truth and justice. Just as willing to fight and die for it. They have their own lovely sunshine ditties, and loving mommies who know without a doubt who the bad guys are and what duty bound honor dictates we must do to them.
Silence invests in me
Doing nothing
Sets Inward free
Is a liberal education
Investing me into it
Or it in me
Invest in me|
I become original
Add to being
Rather than fitting
A brick in a wall
A dollar in a wallet
Liberal educated
For a library fee
When college classes aren’t
Anymore
Making me more me
***
“How do you grow?”
“By investing in yourself.”
Shuronda Robinson of MakingThingsClear.com
From Panel discussion at Woman’s Entrepreneurial Luncheon 2013 Austin Texas
Realms touch
Powers mingle
Magic born
Of fairies
In people
Impossible charmed
Wind alive
Unimagined desire
Dot a dot
Life on fire
Dream physics
Demand require
Honey-dipped moon
Mother heart
Solid revere
Human art
Part ii of:
Because Every Day Is Fucking Magical
Watch your step. Come in. Come in!
Right through this door. No mater that you don’t see it.
You step over the threshold into an aura magnificence. You can tell by the eager faces behind you.
You feel it. You bow your head. You bow because the person if front of you bowes.
The line of visitors behind you eagerly push you forward. Ceiling is lower. You bow deeper.
You are compelled.
Reverence by low ceiling.
Lower, lower. You bow.
Then you kneel before the Alter of Le Clown.
The passage is narrow. The way through is forward.
You do obeisance to LeClown. LeClown trademarked God™. Waywardspirit heisted LeClown’s magnificence™.
So God™ is in Waywardspirit’s pocket.
As you bow before the altar of Le Clown owner of God™ your power got sucked out of you and into Waywrdspirit’s Magical Power-Saver Gene Jars™.
Your power just got sucked out and stored up just like when you sign your signature.
Thanks for coming.
Invite your friends.
Come back next week for great rewards in heaven™.
You’ve earned them!
Part iii …coming next week.
Security richness joy
Already installed
Reboot
Power switch
Re-create experience
By feeling what is not
Neither is heart
Nor want
Not that
Not art
In this life model app
Desire attracts support
I don’t matter
Is Gravity
I matter
I gravity defie
Evil is a gravity
Invisible don’t fly
The world is cartoon.
Why look down?
Daily Challenge:
Half Empty or Half Full
Come to me trolls!
Line up
Line up for kisses
A world needs some more
Lots more handsome princes
Wonder up
Sweet over something
Trip and break one mind
Frolic through answers
Feasting inside
Twist into existence
Leave this window ajar
Re-introduce
Magical spicies into our wild
Daily Post Prompt: Your Inner Dickinson
I need to kill something, but, I hate to hurt things and people. I know I don’t like it cuz I have tried both.
Never got over all the cacti I chopped down pretending I was slaughtering the enemy. No I was not clearing land. Just fighting the enemy. Moaning succulents and cactus’ tears didn’t stop me. Falling limbs from soft giant weeping cucumber,warriors thuded my heart a flutter. I still did it, in spite of the sinking feeling. The exhilaration one was intoxication. A great feeling – cutting down the enemy. But I felt sad, too. Sometimes I said sorry under my breath as the lovely star-shaped slices thumped and splatter on the ground. That hurt my heart. But I couldn’t stop.
Like I couldn’t stop playing violent video games. Like I can’t stop blaming other people and making them wrong, and into monsters in my mind when I judge.
Nope, the games and the t.v. didn’t make me violent.
Fighting for peace, and for liberty did. The epic war stories. The Bible heroes. But I had to enjoy them first. Nope, I was born a howling kid. Violence is my birthright.
Thank God for violent video games!
I need to kill something.
“— an effort to pin complex social or psychological issues on an enemy that can’t fight back.”
Weekly Writing Challenge: Mind the Gap
Ah, looking up
The sky’s in my eye
I’m not quite as lost as a star
Me and the leaves
Turning brown, drifting down
We’ll live again blown on a breeze
Abortion Lovers Unite!
For MORE live birth abortions
Vote For Me!
You know you like it.
Don’t let Anti-Abortion laws stop you from having all the lovely abortions (preferably live-birth) you want!
It’s Your Choice!
Vote For Me!
There. We Now Have The Anti-Abortion’s Opposition!
Sadly, it didn’t exist before.
My passion she –
She chose her Way
My now
My choice
How to
Not
Or feel
Today
***
My baby might not live she whispers; hollow calm lands on my stunned disbelief.
I’m staring at nothing, holding my breath mind goes blank. It’s about the phone. How did I get a call here?
This is a clinic. I’m at a clinic for my pre-natal. No one is that interested in my baby or my check up. It’s just us now. Who would call here for me or care how my check up went? When I walked out of the exam room, The nurse blankly informs me I have a phone call. Before I can protest, some confusion, she qualifies.
You are Jessica LeBaron right?
I nod.
She leads me to the front desk. Confused shock has me when the receptionist staring at the file cabinet hands me the phone.
I’m bewildered.
I didn’t give anyone this number.
Shock didn’t know which to choose, Eva’s unexpected voice and those words. What do they mean? How did I get any call at a midwives’ office.
Eva knows I would be at a clinic on Ben White. That’s it. She is seeing her doctor today too. We were going to talk about our maternity checkups when we got home. Our random appointments ended up being on the same day. This serendipity delights us. Not as much as finding our we are due within the same two weeks though. We thought of riding together to our appointments, but it hadn’t worked out. Our appointments were at almost the same time like our babies, at opposite ends of town.
We were room mates after I got separated, till she got married. We are best friends. We are having babies together. We are excited. We both laugh a lot-till now.
I lose control of my jaw.
Did you hear what I said: My baby isn’t going to live.
She is quiet till I grasp and gasp.
Oh, Eva! I whisper into the receiver.
My baby is not going to live, she repeats with stunned emotion.
Oh. All I can do is sigh.
I’m calling you first because I know you would understand. Would you come over?
Yes, I’ll be right over. I’ll be right there.
Okay, then.
We hang up.
I turn around and rush back to the midwife.
Please help me! My throat clenches tears in my eyes. My friend. She just found out her baby may not live. What do I do? How do I help her?
I don’t feel like I can do her any good.
They tell me how to just be there, to listen and allow her to grieve. I can help then, I figure.
We were going to meet at my apartment. But I go to hers, now. She is on the couch wrapped up in her arms staring into space. She turns and stares at me. Just stares. We stare at each other. The emotional territory was to expansive and explosive to enter. Everything is numb and blank and hurt.
I’m going to a specialist for another sonogram. The doctor is sure of what he sees, or doesn’t see, but he sent me to a specialist. I can’t believe he knows what he is talking about.
I need to calm down. I need to call mom and dad. I still have to tell Jon. How do I tell Jon? I can’t tell Jon!
Jon is out-of-town for another few weeks on in-between job training for the new one. Eva’s parents live in Arizona. She asked me to come. We go to the second appointment together. It’s scheduled around my classes. It was the quickest appointment she could get. Either way I was going.
Five happy moms smile contented almost cooing rubbing their bellies or reading baby magazines in the comfortable deep cushions of the waiting room. I try to do none of those things. We only glance at each other, hoping not to convey despair to the blessed. We don’t talk or leaf through baby magazines or act blessed however. We fidget till we are called back into the brightly lit sonogram room.
The sonogram technician had a softness about her gentle way. Eva lies on the table. I sit in the chair next to her. After she introduces herself and settles Eva she squeezes warmed gel into Eva’s hand then waits for her to rub it around her belly with hopeful stokes. Eva wanted to apply it herself. She places the ultra sound device on Eva’s belly. We all turn to the screen.
First we hear it. A familiar heartbeat. Everything good and normal so far! Eva sighs, fights back tears, stays calm.
We follow the image watching intently as the tech labels and describes the sonogram in a matter of fact way.
The amniotic fluid is very low. There is almost none.
This is the heart here. It’s located on the right side.
Here are the lungs. They under-developed.
Kidneys should be here. Pause.
All of this could be good or at least okay or remedial, we are hoping. We look at each other with another flashing spark of hope. Get some synthetic amniotic fluid inject it, no problem, or something like that.
So what is the problem then? So everything is really okay?!
Well, kidneys are not visible.
What does that mean?
I assume she will just keep on looking till she finds them.
I am not finding kidneys.
What does that mean?
Kidneys manufacture and filter the amniotic fluid. The amniotic fluid gets breathed into the lungs. It is how lungs develop. There is not enough amniotic fluid to develop the lungs. Kidneys are not producing it. There is only one and it is small.
Can that be fixed? Can one be added or something? I could give one.
Even if we could fix that. This shows that the heart is on the right side instead of the left.
Lungs this small won’t catch up in time to breathe at birth, or ever.
Eva whimpers and hides her face.
This small kidney here. Too small to filter enough blood. No kidney visible here…
Stop stop! Stop it! Please stop telling me wrong things about my baby! Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me anymore. She breaks down sobbing shaking, just contained urgent wailing trapped in her not catching her breath.
Tech leans forward pats her and lets her cry.
I understand how hard this is for you. I am sorry.
When she recovers her voice after a while, the tech asked if we were ready to see what the doctor had to say. She Tech led us to the waiting doctor.
His gentleness let her fall apart, again.
She wept then cried out: Why? Why did this happen?
There is no reason. No cause that we know of.
So this just happened to my baby for no reason? She demands.
I’m sorry there is nothing I can do to make this easier, but yes. It’s sad that someone like you who really wants a baby doesn’t get one when I’ve seen babies survive a whole bottle of Drain-O, just fine.
We look at each other horrified.. How could someone not want a baby?
We know the stories, yet we are incredulous. Unfairness is deep.
When you are ready, we can talk about what you want to do next. Come back as soon as you are ready to consider what course of action you want to take.
This is a great loss for you. You and your husband must have been very excited about the arrival of your first child. Take a day. Come back in a day or two. After you talk to your husband, to discuss what you want to do. Be back within two days, I’ll see you whenever you come. He soft smiled warm reassurance then he got up and left.
Like what? What we can do, didn’t hit us till we got home.
Next appointment is about risks and options.
Should I go full term or terminate and start the healing process?
The child can’t breath. It will never breath. It won’t ever function or live. It will suffocate as soon as it’s born, if it doesn’t die during the stress of birth or even before then. It could die at any time.
You could decide to carry to term. If you decide to go full term you need to be seen every week in case the fetus expires and labor doesn’t start. That could lead to blood poisoning, a risk. Otherwise, you can go into labor at any time. There is no way to predict an outcome.
Then in the middle of bewildered not, letting go while not wanting to hold on, or prolong anguish, and wondering, he drops another bomb:
If you are going to choose to end it, he pauses with a sigh of frustration, you have three days to decide. In three days third trimester, anti-abortion laws come into effect. If you don’t choose to terminate in the next three days, after the three days, we can no longer assist you in termination. You must either go into labor, or your life be in danger for the pregnancy to be terminated.
I have to decide now?
You must decide, if you want to take action, yes, within three days. After that there is nothing we can do. Our hands are tied. The law is clear. No exceptions. No third trimester procedures. Third trimester starts in three days.
We sit on her couch staring into space and crying. Her crying makes me cry. I feel the loss of my son all over, plus her loss. By heart about bursts. It has been five years, but when I found out in the middle of getting divorced that I was pregnant, I considered not going through with it, just to be responsible to myself.
I’m in the middle of school with two kids to keep and figure out how to support without a partner. I’m still not able to describe what is going on, but the idea of losing a baby on accident or on purpose both add up the same in my feelings. The idea of adopting my baby out to someone else is unthinkable. We may have no stable future, but in the world I exist in now, I have no other choice. In about a week I love the baby as I knew I would. It would be stupid for me to put my heart up for adoption, or to end the relationship. Even if it’s not responsible to have a child without support, I surrender to being a single mother and feeling happy with Eva.
Now this.
Her parents arrive. I go back to school grieving indignant, and remembering.
While I volunteered for Campus Crusade for Christ and attended the meetings that rallied Christians and got Bush elected in the early nineties I was into the anti-abortion campaign, especially no third trimester abortions. Now something is happening. It’s not black and white anymore.
I can’t just not be pregnant anymore just like that Eva steady wails! The kids at school…the other teachers..the girls they pat my tummy lined up on the way out of class.
If someone asks me if it’s a boy or a girl when I get back I don’t know what I’ll do. Everyone will ask.
Have you got a name yet Miss?
How are you Miss?
How is that baby?
I couldn’t keep explaining there is no baby, her voice cracks, for another three months…but it will be right here…
For three more months. I couldn’t work this way. I couldn’t explain it either. I will just bust out crying, for the next three months. I couldn’t work this way. I’d just be knowing the baby is not going to live or already dead. I don’t know what to do!
I could stay home and be with the baby. It’s to soon to make this choice. I wish Jon could come back and be here. He can’t take off till the end of the week. We have till tomorrow to decide.
Now, I’m in this government class writing a paper about laws. I have allot to say about how stupid this anti-abortion law is. It’s taking Eva to a whole new level of misery, like insult on injury.
My government teacher read only my outrage essays to the class while I skipped it. I went to the hospital with Eva to celebrate the sacred death and birth of her son. Jon couldn’t get back in time. The law couldn’t wait.
We were into our babies.
If she had not been into her baby there would be noting to cry about.
Abortion is like a break up with the baby when this relationship just isn’t working both ways, before you marry…When I’m just not into you.
A shaman woman I know, went into a sacred meditation to talk to the child when she discovered their relationship. She talked to it and listened. She acknowledged their relationship.
I’m thankful you like me she told him. It was a boy. You chose me to be your mother. So I am. Yet, it’s not a good time for me to be in this relationship. Would you try again later?
She got a “sure”.
Next day she started bleeding and thanked her child for honoring her choice.
Wonderful woman I know made their choices to not be mothers when they were not ready. That choice did not include being an oven to bake a child for nine months then give it to someone else.
The adoption choice works good for some people, which is cool.
Pregnancy in the 26th week. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Me? No way is my body gonna be forced to make a lonely baby whom I’m not attached to. No way would I choose to be sick for months, throw up constantly, gain forty lbs, go through labor delivery blood spouting major surgery that takes weeks to recover from, while everyone is wondering, family asking as I’m to wiped out to take care of myself, with no support just to give some one a baby for free.
Pretty dumb all around, if you ask me.
There is nothing wrong with adopting out. I’m personally not into it-at all.
It’s defiantly not the only valid response to birth-control malfunctions. There are as innumerable appropriate valid responses to unplanned pregnancy. As many as there are woman and situations.
The relationship between mother and child is what it is to me. I am in or I’m not. Just like any other relationship.
I can break up. A possible child need not force me.
Babies don’t force me to become their mother. Nor does a baby need to endure a horrible non-wanted toxic environment. It’s a crappy co-dependent relationship that way.
I choose if I want to invite a spirit into a body with my body, into my life. I choose if I want to help someone else by baking a baby for them. I am a free woman. I have lots of choices! Perhaps unborn spirits have choices we don’t know about.
Wouldn’t put it past them. I bet, babies would choose to be happy and mom be happy, too.
Or maybe babies are the selfish assholes?
Baby (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Terrified
Swatting at 1986 killer bees
Today
Agreed upon sanity
Scarce Sweetness
Called sane
Madness’ taste of fairy honey
Holding on breath
The way of our bodies
Whimsically true
Parallel planes entwined
***
Weekly Writing Challenge:
Playing With Space
Interesting:
Imperfection’s part of love
Wabi sabi‘s story of
Frayed edges of insane
Being ecstasy and bane
Cracked heart chipped cup
Shattered then not giving up
Hero and villan of our tale
We’re all the same
Be real
cherished
Evolving imperfection
Daly Post
Daily Prompt:
Imperfection:
Close Up: Magnificent mosaic mural on the corner of 11th Street and San Marcos in Austin.
Close Up: Feeling Perspective on the corner of Waywardspirit Blog and WordPress Plane.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Color
The Seasons
Turn
Life morphs her form
Season reasons
Moon cycles burn
Creative season Springs
Work zodiacs then learns
Favorite season creates
Contemplation Falls on me
Play dances us away
Random Harvests time
Dark Night of Winter’s Soul
Summer is Winter riding low
Two weeks vacation sweetens
Two month’s fruit
Then, forced a Season
Daily Post
Daily Prompt:
Turn Turn Turn
***
Alma Mater
Stillness my speech
School of Life
We all attend
Most unlucky
So fortunate
No school trapped me
Sweet Alma Mater
My library
***
My Attention
Riot of peace
Currency to pay
My best companion
Fountain of joy
The Observer
Gone away
Kidnapped
Wafted off like smell
Forgotten-what are you?
Wooed away
Trapped
Stuck
Wrapped up by emotions
Squeezed out my mind
Daily Post
Daily Prompt:
Most Prized Possession:
National Poetry Writing Month
NaPoWriMo:
We shouldn’t be best friends
Doesn’t change
In the realm were we are still
Written, unwritten letters
Advice you would give me
It’s “you said”, not “he said”
Because I talk to you
Tipping his head, your head
Back against the mattress
To look up at me
Feels the same remembered
We are not friends anymore
And always best friends
***
Daily Prompt: http://wp.me/p23sd-4tQ
Third from the top: The Size of Life:
Post: Story Try This: “We shouldn’t be best friends,” he said, tipping his head back against the mattress to look up at me.
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Transport-A story
It wasn’t the crush, or a temptation. Her shape and bright color captivated me. But more than that, and deeper. The choice is already made. Discovered this the first time I lay eyes on my iMac.
What is this?
The sales guy gave me the info to back up my preference. The colors enchanted me and fueled mysterious passion. It was so hard to pick one. The Steve Jobs story of exile and come-back woke my asleep. The sudden reinvigorating of the market and turn of share. When I stood close that wind of change, stands my hair on end. I feel it blow. Right there in Best Buy, in the isle, next to the iMac display it blows.
Should have known by then, that choices click into place without explanation. Logic is not banished. It just lives in the other world. I invite her blindly back, slow, by comparing prices and waiting three days to bring my love home with me.
I wanted blueberry. Strawberry was the only refurbished model at Best Buy. That was back, way back before the Apple Store or the Apple Story. In the days of three-point-something-percent market share Apple. When Apple still allowed Best Buy to carry her precious babies. More than the sum of its parts, love at first sight, experienced not described. Love got me. A love story told me.
To compromise with my wallet, I bought a refurbished strawberry iMac rev C. It was three hundred dollars higher than a way-more-options PC, even so.
After I brought Strawberry ShortMac home, two sample chapters of a Steve Job’s story found me. Couldn’t afford the book. That was all I needed.
I received a blueberry printer cover in the mail after ordering a strawberry one from Epson. My taste for blueberry, satisfied. Having two printer covers is luxury endowed. What else can I upgrade with?
I download anything Mac compatible that did anything I might want, and didn’t have. install, try, it. The thing was a lemon. It had issues. I fixed it or called tech support, or both every week. Finally the tech support dude, asked me what I was doing to my computer. Strider wasn’t always there, but I always asked for him, cuz he led you through a Lord of the Rings quest as Malady till your iMac worked again. The guys back at support finally asked why I installed all those patches when the machine was working fine. They were mystified. I wasn’t satisfied.
The software it came with was all good but, I was swept away with upgrading. I wanted it to do things. To do something I didn’t know what, but it was irresistible, to try to find out. That and surfing the net. My computer is the bomb. I love it. I play Nanosaur and Bugdom. My kid and I bought Bugdom before it came with all rev D iMacs. Then, we upgraded Nanosaur.
Chat rooms I discovered are dangerous. After three days achat, I vow to never return.
I love iMac so much, sometimes I just stare at her.
When I sat and just look, at this pink form, noticing it, pink love and wavy feelings bubble up then spout like pink gold, Texas tea. I noticed this and sometimes just sat on the bed staring at my iMac for the joy of the delicious feelings that came up. She was my first computer. I’d been hurt-bored by the sea of old sandstone hardware. She though, is gleeful to behold.
Sometimes I’d look at other beautiful things. The angles of my rustic pinewood chair, just so in the light were I’d set it to sweep the dining nook. It’s beauty makes everything soft, the world shimmer. Swept air tastes me, time stands still, the feeling delivers me to the glory my iMac feels of. The floor is clean, a vast place to sit and be eternally swept away. So there I sit and let it. My iMac is happy. I’m happy, and there will there be upgrades for her, that really do stuff. The thought feels like a first encounter. Yes!
Again, pointless love at first sight thought. Feeling rushes crashes on me like the surf. New cool upgrades! I wonder what they will be. I sit in that meditation while a love for something that I want, that feels human, maps a place in me that has always been there. Steve Jobs and Apple are making something I can’t live without. When I checked out the newest stuff though, it was not there… There was noting I couldn’t live without. I was pretty happy with my Mac and printer, anyway.
This kept happening.
Meditation gets intense: iMac, Steve Jobs, Apple, making something for me surges up like candy ocean. When I stay there in the feeling intensity billows like clouds of light making it with lightning. They turn into a river of gratitude for this thing I want that Apple is making for me. It about bursts my chest, till I let it strike me, while I focus on Steve Jobs making this, and flow it to him. Then just like that chaos storm turns river. Washed through intense emotions of rushing light serene flowing, a delicious river in an artery of gratitude to the guy, who is making something for me.
Almost every time I meditate it happens. The feeling, this delight about the new something. It tumbles my feelings into explosive gratitude firing up water turbines, shooting a six-foot cable of light at me. I focus it on Steve Jobs and Apple. Like focusing on the feeling of being in love, with delicious electric current flowing fast as light yet still. A pre-emptive strike of ferocious gratitude. I sit with it till the fireworks turn off.
Multi-colored iMacs thrill me. I kept the folded pictures in my school bag. I can look at it when I want. Not because I need a new computer. The picture induces idolatrous transports like porn.
For a months this happened a few times a week. Then less. After a while I could look at my iMac and focus and nothing would happen.
Other things came up and turned into tornadoes and reflected different places. None felt like a heavenly river of light though. And every year even after the years of the experience dwindled, I’d check out what the hell I was expecting and still don’t find anything earthshaking at Apple.
Bought my second iMac. Nothing special Apple is making for me happened. She is my friend. And I figure she chose to come home with me. She and I bond and enjoy each others company. My new mac is my friend, too.
Then, last year, I got an android smart phone. Blasphemy. I wanted an iPhone. This phone fell into my lap just when I needed it bad and had no other way.
A few weeks later, I’m out with my phone in hand walking in a fascinating wood feeling connected to the world in a friendly intimate way by my phone. A whisper from the Earth’s every voice resonates low in me. Wonder strikes my inner, deeper echo place. Not lightning struck, voice of the world deep rock struck.
Oh, so this is it.
Hmmh no wonder!
It makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense!
Ha! This is what all that advance gratitude was about!
Oh, I love my android, and the World it holds in the webbed palm of my hand.
I love my friend, my phone. I smile when I think of Steve Jobs.
I never met, never saw him. Never wrote and mailed, or talked to him.
One day though, my heart broke in an instant as I raked last years leaves in midsummer Texas heat. Grief torrents and whips me like a blizzard without provocation. Sinking to a log on the ground I weep like a child. My parter thinks I’m crazy for suddenly putting down the rake in subdued grief. Sitting, there, I cry bitter tears for half an hour. Something about my iMac and a dear friend has died. I can’t explain it.
Next day I find out.
A City of Light
Star light rapids
Pillar of day
Water rafters
Sweep hearts clean
Hearts swept away
Ravished blood night
Unimagined communion
Daily Post Daily Prompt: City of Light:
National Poetry Writing Month:
NaPoWriMo: http://wp.me/pf2B5-48H
Rumors preceded him.
She sneaked out to check out the rumors.
This new preacher had it real.
He plants passion
She thought he was handsome.
She was nineteen.
He thirty-nine.
She was a belle at high school.
He had four wives.
She saw him float right off the floor, lifted up by light, knew she would marry him, the presence of some horror she never met, leered at her from the audience.
He moved the crowd left them swaying, went off to a meeting.
She followed him, got his attention, informed him she would be his wife.
He said when I came back to town.
He did. She was ready.
I am their tenth child, counting the ones who didn’t grow up.
They believed in me.
I was their purpose.
Conceived in a Mexican jail.
Born while he stood trial.
She sold my home to bribe the judge.
To give the world my little brothers.
Their purpose was their passion.
They weren’t right.
Yet, in some matters, the matters of their passion, what really matters, they were right on target.
Kids and grown ups feel the same being bullied.
Being bullied.
Becoming bullies back.
The good old USA declared open season on Mormons, by Congress jokes and bullying.
They were not allowed to marry whomever their passion dictated, from the beginning.
They weren’t.
History would have been different if they had been.
But that would make a boring story.
Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Odd Couple
You’ve being exiled to a private island, and your captors will only supply you with five foods. What do you pick?
I am vacationing on this private Earth island.
Been here for a while.
So far I have bought into the limited.
You will only supply me with five foods a day now will you?
Well that is not good enough. Not anymore.
I am not your captor.
Here is the list of what I am having:
All five food groups each for each of my five bodies every day
Cooked and served please
Spirit Body
Mind Body
Physical Body
Emotional Body
Body of Work
We want Five a Day!
We need Five a Day!
We get Five a Day!
Any Questions?
We take care of ourselves and each other.
No compromise.
Thank You for your kind support Facilitator.
Life is Good.
I’m so wanting to believe in people-including the weaker sex. The tits-bated weaker sex. The devoid of reason and control by tits, lured to their death by mermaids, trapable weaker sex. I’m wanting to believe they are not a mistake. Girls-next-door, church lady or stripper, it’s a continual, universal wonder. What’s up with men and tits, woman or whatever?
I’m wondering. Wondering and asking for four years now. I always get answers. So what then? What?
Looking at my breasts in the mirror, to me, is about as enchanting as looking at my hands without a manicure. At least done nails thrill me like adorable outfits. I love looking at my outfits, any outfits. Fashion, outfits, hair, makeup, yummy costumes captivate me, but not bare tits. Tits in lift up lace or leather? Hell yeah. It’s the leather. Trust me, it’s the design, the angles, the style shaped around the tits, tits in a bodice not tits themselves. For sure, not my pretty tits. Not mine, not anyone’s. But really, much less my own. Breasts are for decoration, as far as visual pleasure. That’s it for me.
Breasts and feminine beauty make me feel lovely and captivating when I see them. I never want to touch them. Except maybe out of curiosity, or the softness of the fabric they are tightly laced up in. When I see it, it makes me feel: That is for me! I am this beautiful. Same reason I love romances. It’s how it makes me feel about me. It’s about me. It’s how I feel romanced, loved, worshiped, adored. Tits have almost nothing to do with it, except the feeling seeing them gives me that mine are beautiful. That I am all this beautiful.
Men though, they go retarded instantly over any pair of tits.
Yeah, I don’t trust men.
There is just something sinister in their weakness for tits.
Not only chaste wifely woman think so.
Why do guys always try to get a twenty-dollar dance for ten?
Oh, I so hate that!
It’s so insulting.
I know. It’s belittling.
I just turn around and walk away. I won’t even deal with that kind of customer.
I know, it just brings you down. It devalues us as dancers.
Yeah, it makes me so mad. How would he feel it he wasn’t paid for his work? When ever I go for that stupid deal, I just feel not worth full price.
Yep, ruins your whole night. They keep insulting us with stupid offers.
Grabby guys and ten-dollar guys, the worst!
I don’t know, but what’s up with men in general?
A tits-switch flips their brain cells off.
Just like that. You can’t trust it.
I want to. But.
Oh, god, I know!
I buy into Michelle O’Donnell’s view that God or Allah, or Universal Evolutionary Impulse, or Whatever, did not make the obvious mistake. I mean didn’t make a mistake (even the obvious one) when men were created or wired or whatever, wrong. Wrong. A mistake. But Life doesn’t make mistakes so….?
I mean when I love someone, any other flexed biceps are irrelevant. There is actually only one man in the world. This wonderful utopia doesn’t seem to apply to men. Even when they sing about it, cuz it’s what the stronger sex wants to hear. Or something. I don’t get it.
This question had a lot of chances to be asked.
Wow, this guy is not asking me to have sex for money!
Wait, he is. Who or what do you think I am? Pause. I defer to the mind of “God” on this matter. I understand there is a bigger truth I do not see. I defiantly do not see it!. I trust men are created right, for a reason and not a mistake. Takes deep breath. Sighs. I need help.
No thanks for your kind offer. I dance. That’s all. I only dance and the laws apply.
The question burns like the bright incandescent lamp that always goes out.
My wtf idea of men, is not the truth about men. But I don’t know what the truth is. I really don’t. It’s super annoying.
No, you can’t touch.
Little Tommy, you can’t touch Little Betty that way…
But that day, that one day, everything changed.
It was a normal day. The ten dollars left in my left fitted jeans’ pocket feel good. I had paid my bills and paid off all that debt. I’m ten dollars ahead and ready to start saving. Yeah.
I’m in the zone dressing to go out running when a glance up at my topless reflection in the bedroom mirror captivates me.
I glance, in passing, in the mirror its my tits.
Those. Yes!
Tits! It’s a instinctual wild animal reaction. My whole body shouts out rippling joy. Joy’s crashing waves of smashing euphoria irresistible pleasure.
The mirror’s treasure, edible bliss! I must have. I must touch, now. Reaching where no does not exist. Water after dry days in desert intensity, this cool waterfall of deliciousness palm trees shade smiles all for me to swim in taste, feel with my whole body, tongue electrified, lightning stricken mind, on divine fire, missile target smitten emotions lunge at all this satisfaction just for me. For me!
Oh wait, I better something… as I leap, one arm reaching grasping for heaven, the other reaches for the bill in my pocket. Here! Take it! I must touch! It’s all I have! Take it, please!
If I had 500, I would say the same thing. Or a thousand. Or five thousand. Or whatever…
Then. My reflection is a reflection. I am myself again.
The earthshaking pleasure, in a river of chocolate I taste with every pore of my body, and the vast space of tasted mind, the ease the universal delight of dessert, tastable delights walking around everywhere in my whole world vanishes.
I don’t’ know how anyone can live, or not live, like that.
No words suffice for the world men live.
Goddam God! No mistake made! Question answered. Got it. Okay.
The intense rushing cascades of joy from just seeing and feeling, wanting to touch!
Never felt anything even remotely like it. There are no words. Nothing comes close. My emotions are just as intense and delightful, but its even the same taste bud. Indescribable heaven of physical desire.
I don’t even understand how men handle this so exceptionally well. I, I couldn’t handle it. I’d go around tasting everything, begging, borrowing and stealing, more, more! What a wonderful world! Wow God. You knew what you were doing. What a sexy world!
I understand now why a man would feel like he is hungry and being deprived of all this amazing food. It sits there wasted while he starves. He steals it, of course! What starved person wouldn’t. It’s stupid like: “A mans steals a loaf of bread and shit goes down.” I might even have just taken it in that moment. No handle on restraint, no practice, no understanding of the harm it could cause to the wonder of beauty dessert.
Hopefully “she” would have been a big enough slut to accept my ten.
Porque yo no respondo!
Because I can’t be held responsible for what I might have done!
…Men are intensely vulnerable, sweet and lucky.
Creation is fucking awesome.
Response to: WordPress
The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Trading Places
Remember when we were dumb?
Seven-year-olds looking back at being six.
Remember we thought we ‘d get lost if we walked over there behind those trees?
Yeah!
We were so dumb!
Remember when we were dumb?
We used to be so dumb. Every year. Then, the next year we were smart.
One of my sisters or I would inevitably pop the question. We laugh at our old dumb selves. Then start remembering something even dumber.
Remember when we used to fight for Roundy?
Yeah! That was so dumb!
No it wasn’t! Food actually tastes better when you eat it with the one-and-only round spoon!
Remember when Sandra decided to just keep the dang thing in her pocket all day? She could instantly win the fight to eat supper with Roundy?
Well that was smart. Till it fell out of her pocket into the outhouse.
Remember how mad I was at her? She was so dumb! I chased her all over to get her to stop and listen to how mad I was, and how dumb that was. When I caught her I punched her. Wow. She slapped me back. So I had to chase her to hit her back. I was so dumb!
We were thirteen when it dawned on us that we were always going to have been dumb.
What are we going to think is just dumb?
What are we going to know was really dumb?
What is gonna be really, really dumb and what will be, cringe, so, soooooo dumb?
Remember when we used to believe snakes and scorpions would chase you as soon as they look at you? Remember we used to practice out-running snakes?
Yeah!
Remember we thought scorpions were gonna be as big as squirrels. They were going to chase us with their stinging squirrel tails curled forward to jab us to death with that one deadly poison sting.
We were so dumb!
We could try to avoid some of those.
We tried.
It hasn’t worked.
I can still sit and ask my sisters this same question and get the same kind of answers. Still makes me cringe. Still embarrassing. Still unthinkable. Still nothing we can do about being so dumb.
Remember when we thought “bad people” were all going to hell?
Yeah, and we really felt dark skin was inferior, too.
Yeah. Don’t remind me!
Remember black people just were never going to add-up?
It’s to soon to remember that one. I don’t want to remember when we were dumb.
Well, we really did believe that.
I know we did! But it’s so embarrassing. I’d rather remember squirrel tailed scorpions. Remember we argued whether scorpions were furry like squirrels or reptilian like lizards?
Remember when I found a lizard that curled up it’s tail when it raced by? I ran like hell. It was a baby scorpion and had a momma scorpion, like a mamma bear, near by.
Yeah and I took you to find that lizard to prove that scorpions were lizardy not squirrelly. Remember we figured hunting a dragon. We crept into a dragon’s lair, over there between that cactus and those two bushes. Glad we practiced running like hell. This scorpion might attacked us.
I was so going to prove to you that scorpions were more dragon-lizard than vicious-squirrel. I had already practiced my acceptance speech.
Remember a tiny scorpion. The stare in disbelief at the puny thing after we shook, ran just from the name? Just a weird insect thingy. After we named it we ran for our lives. Deadly!
Remember we thought gay was an abomination, condemned?
Would you please shut up!
Remember when….
I’m not listening!
Okay remember when we puffed our bangs up into that big forward arch? Remember we thought that was tho only pretty way to do bangs?
I try not to!
Oh, but even worse, we thought there was one right way to heaven and we were on it. All ten of us, while everyone else was going to hell. That wasn’t the worst part though. Everyone else was going to hell unless we showed them the right way.
Yeah, okay, I remember, unfortunately… See ya the hell later. I’m getting out of here. Want anything from the store?
***
Judgement day sucks!
Judgement gained: Priceless!
In response to The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Judgement Day
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/daily-prompt-book-cover/
Competition focuses, reaches, catches, traps, evolves, gives, takes, glorifies, laughs. Competition is a god.
Competition is like love. I don’t want to give it up! Like love, competition puts the fun in everything. Competition makes games. Games make fun. Fun makes community.
Think, Olympics without competition.
Imagine only one football team.
Games, all about not winning?
Business, drooping like some Communism.
Events, not planed to out-do the one before.
Competition is god. Sometimes though, we stand up to god. We can pick how we want to worship. We get to say what games we want to play. Vote with our feet.
The game where a few smart and amazingly talented people beat the rest of the world at the Monopoly is not fun. The point of a game is fun right? Fun on both sides. When the game is over, it stops. Or when we say it’s over, it stops. It’s a game. We made the rules, remember?
Play a new game.
Tug of war is no longer fun when it’s people against a machine. Maybe this game got dropped from the Olympics for good reason.
Give us bread lest we die.
It’s that old story. Growing up I always thought the protagonists that the God in the Bible Stories helped were the good guys.
But Joseph Sold Into Egypt he was more like a Red Ocean dreamer of dreams. So, like Warren Buffet, he could tell what the economy was going to do. We get the story that his prognostication was fair and based on the weather. Maybe so. In that case, so is the economic climate: There was going to be an inflation then a drop. So he invested and bought up all the corn. Yeah, people ate nothing but corn.
Then when the Great Depression err famine came he did the usual.
The people spent all their money on food the first year of the seven-year famine, Great Depression.
Second and third years people traded their cattle for food.
Next years their land.
Then the clincher: Give us bread else we die!
So, our righteous Joseph-Sold-into-Egypt accepted the lives of everyone in the kingdom in exchange for feeding them. Viola!
He was the king’s deputy. Kings are servants of their people. Not the other way around. They got their jobs backwards.
I don’t know if a God did or didn’t give him the heads up or the vision of patterns and the wisdom to save the world from starvation. Enslaving everyone was not necessary, though. Or was it? It was four hundred years later that, well surprise, Joseph’s own descendants are enslaved to the system that he started when he might have just served.
They wanted out of slavery and vicious miracles got them out in our Exodus Bible story.
Key to being enslaved is both sides play the game.
Oh, so you want just you and the Pharaoh to be left alive then?
You lose us, you lose your kingdom. Ayn Rand glorifies this outcome. In her popular novel Atlas Shrugged, just a Pharaoh and a Joseph and a mighty girl are left after they didn’t help the people. Try and get dumber than that. No one else was worth it. Some folks do seem to think that is a great story. (Note: I was one of them. People change.)
“Give us liberty or give us death!”
It’s just an attitude, as opposed to:
“Give us bread else we die!”
People are more important than game rules. Rules and games are for people. People matter. Public servants are for people. Smart ones are great gifts to all of us. Smart people matter just as much as not-smart-in-that-way, people.
Joseph and Warren Buffet can serve and care and offer their gifts how their hearts desire.
We have hearts, too. We can dictate what we experience and believe by consciously making choices.
We don’t have to sacrifice liberty to live. We don’t have to kill anyone, or die.
My childhood hero Joseph Sold into Egypt no longer impresses me.
Re-living re-rewriting this same story now.
Heroes, step up.
In response to WordPress The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Competition
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/daily-prompt-competition/
One thin slice of Idyllic
Whole when each shares hers
This is impossible
Possible, what I experience
Experience, what I want
***
Response to:
WordPress Daily Post
Daily Prompt:
Idyllic
Try it here:
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/daily-prompt-idyllic/
Flavor is in relationship. Yummy people! Tasty things. Breathable feelings.
Flavor is a recipe. Subtle spice, people salt, texture things, color mixed, just so original ingredients, design place flavor.
The usual staple ingredients are pretty much the same everywhere. It’s the details that delight you. The details of landscape, story, living things.
The flavor of a place.
Local flavor is song of people in their happy places, letting bees buzz.
I keep Austin weird. Enough of us do to cook Austin a creative wild dish for the world to taste once and want to stay.
Places have unique flavor color weirdness.
Same with sideways people.
Sideways traditions.
As weird as you really are.
In response to WordPress
The Daily Post.
Daily Prompt: Local Flavor
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/daily-prompt-local-flavor/
Tosh was like that. Her voice electrified empowered, drove like a wireless tool.
You guys are getting out of here, now. Her tone is final. Get your asses out! You will never come back here again.
It came to this. A long whispered navigation through our non-options, huddled in the visiting room hoping it wasn’t being recorded.
You have to get out of here. You know it. Her voice went down instead of up. You will disappear.
Goodbye good luck and good riddance.
We knew she meant the situation, not us. We huddled and hugged. I don’t know how, but you are going to do it. I am willing it. So, you know it will happen.
It started to happen. We did our best. Now, instead of visiting her in Tuiles County Jail again this weekend, we are stranded. Stranded on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales with no money, no gas, not a crumb of smuggled food left. It’s hot, hungry, scary as thirsty hell. No friend, no place to show up. Not even to park. No gas to go on. Nowhere to sleep after two bat flying nights and bleary eyed days without a stop on the oil dripped road. Except to pee re-oil.
We were six. All under seventeen. All running away from different foster homes in Salt Lake City. All crammed into the belly of the beast, taking turns driving. I am fifteen, but my twelve-year-old brother drives my turn. I just prayed and shook, shook and prayed. They drove the thousand miles to the freedom of the Mexican border.
We got across it too, with just a social security card.
Mexican delightful air feels free light, a breathable shout of joy. The morbid weight of being caught, taken back to testify again vanishes. I’m too tired to shout, so I skip a little, smiling with my whole body. When I look around, five others had the same relived triamph glow on their faces. The air in Mexico tastes good. But it is hungry air, going nowhere.
Gas should have run out near Flagstaff, by Estephania’s summer school mile-per-gallon calculations. That was hundreds of miles ago.
We hadn’t expected to eat. Who knew. This car hadn’t been pillaged yet. Estephania secretly bought this beast three days ago with school clothes money. We stole licence plates for it off a same looking abandoned, sorta, car. Then kidnapped our younger brothers. They searched my little brothers, did, and scored 50 cents from between the seats. So from nothing we went to having a whole kilo of fresh tortillas from a Tortilleria. The best tortillas I ever remember smelling tasting, slow chewing. The only thing left from the picnic basket was salt. We didn’t even dream of butter. Okay, we did, but salt was still perfect.
Pulling over out of town parking and sleeping on the ground for two days didn’t improve our mood. The boys found water. That improved our survival.
I found acorns in the leaves we laid on. If you can stand the bitter, and focus on gathering and cracking little handfuls, you don’t have to stay hungry, a germ at a time. But I was still so hungry from not wanting to do that and the bitter was worse than hunger. Fasting is at least worth something.
So, I am fasting. Pretending I am fasting. Way to bitter not to. Finding a way to survive in the wilderness had been on my bucket list. Check.
We will survive! We will make it back home to the kids.
But shit! We need a better plan.
None came. Every possible one failed depressing us more every time we talked.
Two edgy sweat-filled ravenous days drowning in knowing we couldn’t go forward jackhammered the resolve in our eyes. But it didn’t move the picture of resolve in Tosh’s eyes from our inner eyes.
That last night driving to the border knowing gas would run out any second was war. The invisible enemy guns aimed at us. Ambush any second. We would be caught and skinned. Being caught, just the thought, made my stomach fall into the bottomless pit where my heart was.
All it would take is one cop to look twice. Out of gas and no way to buy any was a ticket straight back to foster homes. We wouldn’t see Tosh either, then. After all Sgt. Vogtechy wouldn’t bother to drive six of us all day to see our sister once a week, again after this, would he? Now we ran. The hollow spirit creeps of murdered eye sparkle, sucked at my soul. Life would suck unimaginably worse than before if we were caught and taken back there again. We would be caught prison escapees. Cruel. Punishing. Looks.
Besides we would have failed. Failed. So, so much worse! The wrath of God was supposed to be worse, but wrath of my foster parents totally trips me.
I feared the betrayal in their eyes. In hers it wold be shooting aimed fire. Withering. I know it’s there. They won’t understand. Can’t explain it. Those looks I sense drive me mad. Mad!
Betrayal is in his eyes. That I dare not even imagine. I can’t be thinking of it now, it drives a tornado ice drill. So I don’t. His eyes, hurt more than hers in wherever something I don’t understand.
Nothing to do.
Drive to where the gas will take us.
It takes us to the Judicial checkpoint outside Nogales. They won’t let us by.
Vayanse! Get out of here. You can’t come through.
Nowhere to go. The relief from being out of the USA is tangible. None of us is willing to go one inch closer to that place by turning around and driving back.
You kids aren’t either Mexicans.
Show me your papers.
The car’s got no papers either?
Go back were you came from or we are going to have to confiscate your car. It’s not ever your car is it?
We looked at him shrugging with our eyes. Looked at each other. We know judiciales pick and choose what they confiscate. This old four door green dinosaur Ford wouldn’t make the cut. We are embarrassed driving it. Though just then, we were beyond all embarrassment. Unmoved, we just sit there. He just stood there. Crossed his arms. Fidgeted. Walked away. Came back.
You guys are not getting by. Please leave. Now.
We didn’t. He hurried off to check out new arrivals.
We are frozen. In limbo too exhausted to move. We sat there indefinitely.
Quitense! Get out of the way! Other people want to get through.
We pulled the car to the side. Nothing else came to mind. Nowhere to go. Stunned we sat staring straight ahead staying out of each others fried terrified thoughts.
I need help! We need help! Falling falling into the well, down down were my heart is in the pit. I give up, whatever this is. God You gotta handle this!
The dust doesn’t settle. We do, right out of the way, on the side of the road next to the through lanes. We parked and stayed.
We just stayed there.
Then a surreal crazy man in a judicial uniform burst out of the dust and sun and silence.
Vayanse! Vayanse ninos!
A frustrated Judicial was waving his arms shouting. Get out of here kids! Just get the hell out of here! This time, he was waving us forward.
We drove on.
No gas. No money. A few hundred miles through the desert to Caborca.
We drove.
Dreams have no choice but to come true!
What would you do if you were a dream?
Why not just suck out all the money? Everyone is creepy oblivious. It’s simple, easy and just a mater of tweaks and time. The law is on my side. Besides it’s a big fun risky game of Monopoly. Not like there is anyone who can play against me. It’s boring when you don’t have a nemesis!
I turn evil and do LeClown wicked when I can’t take it like that anymore.
If I were a money mastermind, though, I would have to answer the question to myself, for myself.
Who or what would be my Lady Godiva?
ITNJs, two percent of the population? That’s it? We are rare awesomeness! Each with magnified unique gifts, too.
No wonder…on the grandiosity issues. How do you feel when you figure out you have this crazy super power? No one would believe this!…Till you show them like Steve and Warren and Aaron.
How the hell are we supposed to meet each other when we are so few and all hiding out with our extraordinary, opposite gifts?
Oh, yeah, intuition and serendipity…Can you consciously count on destiny and “divine intervention” when you are totally logical? The two don’t mix here.
Must be why we are misfits, not-well-adjusted, misunderstood, gone evil, so often.
What does it take to intervene for would-be-evil-masterminds before our gifts rot from un-acknowledge, misuse, misdirect, too-avant-garde-reject?
Irresistible game, that money one. If I could see money-flow patterns like I see other patterns, I would need to do something with it, like Warren does. I would need a Lady Godiva to help me answer my question about it, too.
If I can’t find an outlet for my genius, something that matters to serve, I will turn evil. I will play. Or I’ll just kill myself, like Aaron. Or kill other people, or systems. I am dangerous or a super hero. I am a mastermind.
What inspires me to help the 98% when I decide my goal?
I will play you my 98%. I will play you some way.
It’s not like I have a choice. It’s the game fire in my heart. I have to find it and keep it burning, like Mary Lou Retton said, or go mad.
My dad was an evil mastermind. I am a mastermind. It’s up to my environment whether I turn evil or serve daring greatly. I think it was sorta up to his, too. We all have a choice, yes. Dumb people make that choice lean pretty steep toward evil for a rejected superhero. The story and interpretation matters, too.
Either that or he was Lucifer’s immaculate conception. Makes me one-third daemon.
Thanks dad for the genes. Thanks everyone else who “knows” my dad is evil for the daemon part.
And if you don’t understand. You try on being Hitler’s kid for five minutes.
Who’s your daddy?
Adolph Hitler.
___________!!!
Really. Try it.
Being Ervil LeBaron’s daughter, that’s what it fucking feels like. Well it did. Till I realized: If he is Darth Vadar, I am Princess Leia. The probability of my turning evil greatly decreased with this story. Beware anyway.
The funnest part of being Ervil LeBaron’s kid though, and no amount of explanation or Luke Skywalkering changes it, is that half of my brother’s and sisters are in prison, or mental hospitals. Did I mention evil?
Weird that those of us who are not institutionalized are rocking the world with awesome innovation, leadership, character, technology, art, emotional work, vulnerability, love and daring.
Except me. I’m the one who lost the rat race. Too introverted, intuitive, thinking judgement all to an autistic degree, and way to into stuff, way to far, way to long before it trends, to be useful.
So, I figure something is a little off in the system. I love the system and my family and people, yet we are all still off. You know, the usual. Everyone and everything is off. Off, sick, painful and lovable.
Just like our evil masterminds. Just like me.
I am the 98% to other evil masterminds.
So, Ninety-Eight Percent, we create our own leaders. We focus our own genius mastermind’s hearts.
Lets get better at it. Blaming whoever we give away our power to when shit happens or shit doesn’t is fishy and fail.
We masterminds are at your service.
Getting everyone out of messes like all the bad things going on in our world, piece of cake to us. Impossible to you.
We want and need understanding, respect and honor just like anyone else, no matter how much money power or whatever pattern we master. Serving thrills us like it thrills you. We value meaning like everyone else.
We will play.
Might as well charm us into playing with you, for you.
Or we will rot, die, or be charmed tricked or tempted into playing against you, or killing you. There are lots of ways.
When you need the one of us who is the Jaws Of Life, you don’t have her. You have imprisoned her and rusted your own precious tool.
Now, she can’t help you. You get to watch people explode, bleed to death.
Note: Society’s best mastermind tool X Men solutions are likely in prison or mental institutions, homeless, starving artists, or sliding there now.
The solution is always found inside the problem.
Yeah, I know. This topic is not trending yet.
It will.
You are ahead of the game now, weather 98% or 2%.
Link to INTJ definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ
INTJs are one of the rarest of the sixteen personality types, and account for about 1–4% of the population.[2][3]
INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment) is an abbreviation used in the publications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) to refer to one of the sixteen personality types.[1]
This article is about the Myers-Briggs personality type. For the Socionics INTj, see Logical Intuitive Introvert.
She pets me
She is my pet
Sometimes we go to sea
I through her
She lives in me
Manager sent:
Her text pict went wherever texts go when not instantaneously delivered.
Thought it was my alarm at 2 am.
Snapped out of exhaustion into alarm-focussed-sleep-attention.
It was this note posted at work.
Best text ever!
-Slept till now.
Daily Post Wring Challenge: 2AM Photo:http://wp.me/p23sd-4le
It’s super cool to stomp away from stupid people who are too pea-brained to see the truth. Then show up among people of inconsequence where we are gonna get it right. Just watch us!
It’s awesome and miraculous to flee the slavery of Egypt into the Promised Land, then show them we can do better as we wipe out all the people of no consequence occupying the lands we have promissory notes to. We are gonna get it right.
You know, flee religious persecution in the Old World and come to the New World where there are no people of consequence, and show them back home we can get it right. Just like this.
Flee German slaughter into ancestral land strewn with people of no consequence, and no promise, and show them Germans that we don’t treat people like that. We can get it right, just like this.
We flee United States persecution into the wilderness of Utah among an uncivilized people we bring consequence to, where us truth-bearing Mormons are gonna get it right. Just watch us.
We escape the persecution of the gone astray Mormon church into the Promised Land of Mexico among a lost and fallen people, were we are gonna get it right. We are getting these bloody drug wars right. Just watch us!
Flee the zombie hordes of corporate America, of this corrupt government, into survival mode, and watch the thing go up in smoke. We have miraculously escaped. We are gonna get it right this time. Watch us.
I hate my fail parents. I’m gonna get the hell out of here and get it right! Seriously, just watch!
It’s the Pharaohs’ fault.
It’s the kings’ fault.
It’s President Van Buren’s fault.
It’s the new president of the Mormon churches’ fault.
It’s Hitler’s fault. It’s Hitler’s fault, again.
It’s corporate greed and the system’s fault.
It’s _________’s fault!
It’s all my idiot parent’s and family’s stupid fault.
While here in my tiny all-encompassing world, it is ALL evil monster Ervil LeBaron’s fault. The bastard!
But, I’m gonna get it right this time. Just you watch me!
This is how I really feel:
***
Response to WrodPress
The Daily Post
Daily Prompt: Bone of Contention
Wiped this off a tunnel under Mopac at Duval.
It took some of my perfect angle shot.
As I read this, I hear the voice inside my head reading this.
Hello Voice.
As I read, I hear you reading.
When I notice.
Why are you an abstraction?
Oh!
Hello Abstract Me.
Stranger than fiction.
True of this tribe.
My tribe.
Now, we will get to make sweet bread! We hadn’t tasted it in months.
We just finished building that oven. We showcased ourselves, dirty hands and triumph, instead of showcasing it. Round top peeps up in the back.
Our own wood-burning adobe plastered oven, like the pioneers-that we were.
Boy did that oven deliver!
That’s me up front with the light-colored flowered blouse, bowl haircut.
A perfect goal-oriented-working-day in my favorite blouse. Favorite, yes favorite with orange and yellow flowers. Plus, the sleeves aren’t to long or two short. They are medium size. Like me.
Totally didn’t expext my best bluse to never look good and feel favorite again after that perfect day.
That day, I didn’t have to do 20 People’s dishes-three times.
I could fly!
Hadn’t seen this picture in thirty years.
Then, last year, our long-lost, very lost, friend posted it on Facebook.
Lots of stranger than fiction under the bridge since then!
Just saying.
Lovers, mothers
Newborns and strong men
Once doing
Alive in grass
Leaves of Grass spell is cast
When it takes in me, takes in you
Grass leaves, grass roots
Between fiction, and existence
Components of real from elusive unimaginable
Crafting reality vocation
Shaped with tools
Reshape it
With a wolf
Fist, you are a horrible human being-a monster.
Everyone thinks so. Everyone who doesn’t know you.
When we the people get our hands on you it will hurt. We will make you a scandal, an outcast. We will humiliate you with accusations, gossip, tabloids, trial, jail, hopefully death. We laugh. There is no way out of it for you. We are right and we know it.
So, betray your families. Let us make your kids the children of monsters. We will make them orphans. You did it to us. We are justified. We want to turn your loves, your wives, into prison widows. We want to cause you pain. We want to watch. We are right.
Why don’t you see justice?
Why are you fighting back?
We are right!
It looked like he came out a gate. He may have come from behind. He is looking away as he walks away from the fence, Eva’s fence. Vague perplexed twitches scratch my mind. Did he come from her yard or something? Or was that not a side gate closing? He doesn’t even turn to look at us when we pull up in front of this house. Or was he just walking from the field behind her house?
I have never been here. Just now I drove up for the first time. My sister Gaby has, and was having trouble remembering which house is Eva’s. Oh, it’s that one! We were half past it when I pull over and parked. I’m too done driving to put the car in reverse and back up a few feet and park directly in front of the house. I just idle the car waiting for Gaby to insist, or I’m not re-parking. She doesn’t insist. So, I turn the car off.
We are way passed the driveway. Our car is parked half way between what is supposed to be Eva’s house and the next house on a quiet Phoenix col-de-sac. If Gaby is right, our old best friend Eva lives here with her three-year old daughter I can’t wait to meet, and her boyfriend I haven’t met yet either.
Are you sure this is Eva’s house?
Yeah, now I’m totally sure.
Is that her boyfriend, then? I nod in the direction of the man crossing the narrow side yard between the house and the construction site next door.
Gaby turns and stares in his direction. He reaches the construction cluttered next door front yard, bends over and picks up a bucket. His back is to us. He walks a few feet, puts the bucket down, turns and picks up the garden hose, then walks a bit further and puts it down, then reaches for a shovel.
No! He is way to old to be Eva’s boyfriend.
Well it looked like he was coming out of her fence. But I’m not sure. Maybe he wasn’t.
I don’t know what he is doing, but that is not Eva’s boyfriend. Why would you even think that?
I don’t know. Maybe she hired him to work on something. What if he is a friend of her dads or something? He could have come from behind the house, I couldn’t tell for sure.
I watch him, perplexed. He stands the shovel against the wall by the front door, picks up a brick from there, and puts the brick where he got the hose from.
First I’m wondering who he is. Now I’m wondering what he is doing. He seems busy and focused. His feverish work keeps his face turned away from us. If he was working for Eva, unless he is real shy, he would have wondered about us by now, maybe said hi, and figured out who we are. He must be shy or obsessed or something.
But he would have expected us, if he knew Eva. She would have told us if he would be working on something when we are showing up.
Even shy people notice a car drive up, and woman in it. Not a glance though.
Gaby is getting her things, cleaning up, folding sweaters, bagging up food wrappers and Starbucks cups. She tosses the pillows into the back seat and reaches back for her overnight bag. I turn the music down.
You go on in. I’ll come in after a while.
The truth is, I just can’t move. I need stillness. This happens sometimes.
It’s about ten in the morning, we drove all night expecting to arrive sooner, before Eva left for work. Traffic held us up after we did a circle around Sky Harbor. Eva isn’t home now, so rushing in won’t make me see her any sooner, anyway. I must sit here, breath, relax.
One thing I love about Gaby is she gets me. I don’t have to explain why I just sit here. I don’t help put CD’s away or straighten up or fold the lap blanket, or tell my daughter to get her things. I turn off the music.
Gaby looks around. Maybe we should tell Eva.
I think so. I nod.
I zone out. Gaby doesn’t disturb me.
I don’t see what the guy is working at. The hose doesn’t go into the bucket, or on a pile of cement to water and mix. He doesn’t turn it on. He doesn’t follow-up with a next logical step. The next, brick he picks up, he puts down next to a half-empty sack of cement. When he takes the rake from one spot on the ground and puts it down at another random spot on the ground, an uncomfortable feeling crescendos in bewildered, silent questioning.
What is going on!?
Sitting there uneasy, wondering, dazed, zoned, empty, time stands still.
A silent flash of nothing mixes with the nothing in me. It forms something. Not thought or words or even a feeling. It is an absolute, a knowing, an imperative, a command, no voice. Word-thought shaped of unquestionable authority that is not mine, booms in a still unheard un-voiced statement of fact.
“She is mine.
You can’t touch her!
She is mine.
Because I love her.”
I don’t know what stated this. It felt exactly like my feelings, but it wasn’t me. I just totally agree, because I do, and don’t know why, except that of course, it’s just what I would have said if I had thought of it, and knew why I’d thought of it. But I didn’t, and I didn’t.
But, then, it strikes me to add:
Not her, not anyone!
Then nothing. A sense completion, followed by a sense of peace.
My job here is done. It is a feeling, a certainty that came with this mystery. I have nothing else to do here, but don’t know how to say it, or even think it.
You can say or do what you think is right, Gaby. Whatever you think needs to be said to Eva or done, you do it. I’m not going to do anything.
The guy, when I notice again, has gotten on a bike. He rides past us with his face turned away staring, eagerly searching, it would seem, for something amazing across the street.
I can move now. Then no further thought. I forget about the whole thing. We all get up and go inside to shower, sleep and wait for Eva.
While Eva gets dinner, that evening, I play in the back yard with our kids. Our ball hits the gate. I look at it. It is unlatched. I latch it.
When we go inside I remember. The side gate was not latched, Eva. Now it’s latched.
It was unlatched? It couldn’t have been. Maybe…, she seems suddenly exasperated, well I don’t know how, I better double check after some people come over.
I don’t think of any related incident or anything else to say about it, while she seems frustrated with her beloved suspect.
Gaby forgot about the whole thing, too.
We all had a great time together, for a couple of days then we got back on the road.
After a few weeks when we were back home, Eva called Gaby frantic and terrified, sobbing.
The police had pounded on her door, urgently showed their badges and ordered:
Get your purse and your kid right now. You have to get out of here. We can no longer ensure your safety. Don’t come back here under any circumstances. You can arrange for someone to pick-up your things later.
We leave right now.
You know the Bicycle Stalker?
Yeah, of course.
He has now been identified. He is in your area. You and your daughter fit the profile.
While she looked down, I stared. Every time she was this close since that first day, my hand always almost reaches to touch. My hand wants to, besides my wanting to. Curiosity and that feeling of touching soft, of touching mystery is too much this time. I figure she won’t notice. I’ll barely touch, and she won’t even feel it. Then, I won’t have to ask. I don’t know what she would say if I asked. She might get mad. She might not like me anymore. She is my teacher. I want her to like me. I like her.
My fingers reach and touch her hair. She does notice. She doesn’t seem mad, or surprised. Her hair is soft and fuzzy in a big roundness and it doesn’t move like all the other hair I’ve ever seen does. It looks soft and feels fluffy and spongy. I hadn’t been sure it was hair. I still am not sure, but I think it is. I don’t know how she gets it like that.
She used to be strange when I first came to school, before she was Ms Andrason. Her face is wide and round, with a flat wide nose. She looked like people I know in Mexico, except they all had dark skin and I expected them to look like that. Her lips are thick, too. She seems so different from all the other normal people I know. Her skin is whiter, but she looks more Mexican than Mexicans. Then, she has that fluffy round hair. Now she is Ms Andrason and I wouldn’t like at all if she looked any different.
The kids that she had in kindergarten like her, too. She lets them wrap their arms around her waist or leg and hang there, swinging like babies. She wraps her arms around them back. Sometimes she leans to put her arms around the kids who put their arms around her. I want to be like that, too, but I didn’t go to kindergarten. And I don’t want to be a baby. I’m not a kindergarten baby. So, I told the kids singing:
“Kindergarten baby
Born in the navy
Eating butter and gravy”,
I’m clean. I never got contaminated by kindergarten. Now, I’m lucky I didn’t go.
Ms Andrason doesn’t know me like she knows them, though. I can’t think of any excuse that doesn’t terrify me, to stand close to her like they do, and be a favorite. I don’t feel like I’m not her favorite. I just want to be her most favorite. She doesn’t have one yet. I’m going to be right there next to her with the same reasons they have to be there and for her to remember things with me, the way they do.
When she calls to line up I am the first. Well, except those times I was flying so high on the half-moon seesaw with Courtney. We would be friends forever flying off our seats, white-knuckle holding on, shrieking wild terrified delight.
I ignored her calling everyone to line up. She frowned. My heart sank. Courtney seemed not to notice. Something in her voice told me I could still be her favorite anyway, though. Courtney And I couldn’t wait for recess again. We wouldn’t stop breathless whispering in line. So, that time, well, I whispered in line and, didn’t try to please her at all.
Next recess Courtney is playing with Casey on the seesaw.
I don’t play with girls. His voice was steady and certain. It is a fact, by his voice. I never have. I never will.
Casey is the handsomest boy I have ever seen. I never talk to him. I might smile, or cry, or smile crying. I rush away. Watching them on the seesaw from behind the bushes bores me. Their butts stay in the seat. Courtney searches the playground till he sees me in the bushes. He looks at me bored from slow in the air. He looks away on his way down, then gets off.
It’s easier to mind Ms Andrason, again, so I do every day. I watch for when she reaches for her whistle. Before she blows it, I rush to line up. Sometimes I line up when I think she is going to reach for it. She doesn’t. I pretend to be playing just there, by myself.
I’m like a stone in line. The girls giggle. I’m a rock. Boys and girls chase each other around in the line. I’m still as a tree. They run around me. Ms Andrason notices I don’t play in line. I stay quiet when we file into the classroom. No one else notices me.
Okay, Marcy does notice me, but then she puts on her swagger and walks away. She has this walk. She walks like she would never fall off the seesaw no matter how high she flew.
The way she moves her shoulders and sways her hips in a stomping sorta way makes me think she is like a boy. She would be fun to play with, but she doesn’t want to reel on the seesaw with me.
We could touch the sky!
Her indifference is not an ooh-hoo indifference. She is not scared or fragile or wearing a dress or might hurt her fingers or lose a barrette, miss an earring. So I figure she only likes bigger ones. Bigger seesaws or Disney Land or something worldly like that, maybe even real horses. Horses are not worldly though. Well, I ride horses, too. I got to in Veracruz when we lived there. But she doesn’t talk about it. So, I guess she has been all over and done all the fun stuff. She wants to talk about something else, now.
No one else knows about what I like to talk about, so I don’t talk to anyone. She seems more lost and frustrated than haughty. I know how she feels.
I bet you don’t know either.
I bet I do.
I bet you don’t.
What then? I challenge her. Nothing she can say will be anything I don’t know.
Computer.
What?
Computers!
See, you don’t know.
She tells me it is a thing that does things. And you make it do things.
A toy?
No. Way better than a toy.
But nothing is better than a toy. And her thing is weird and doesn’t make sense.
I do know, but I think it’s boring.
Know you don’t either know. I don’t have one, but I want one. And, I’m going to help my brother and my dad work on them till we make one. I’ll know all about it by then. But you don’t know what I’m talking about or believe me either.
Why would she ever choose whatever that boring thing is instead of seesaws, horses and fun toys? So, she has all the horses and seesaws she wants, but she wants that whatever thing, obviously dumb and boring, or I would know about it.
Yes I do, I just don’t want to talk about it.
No you don’t. No one else does either. She gives me a frustrated defiant head shake, turns around and swagger off. I love watching her saunter with her straight blonde hair swinging back and forth like a boy’s would if it were down to his shoulders. But boy’s hair never is.
She is such a waste of fun. But I like her anyway, even if we don’t talk about anything.
It’s story time. I’m wondering if I can sit next to Ms Andrason and try to touch her hair again.
Who would like me to read their library book for story time today?
Oh, you can read mine, Ms Andrason.
Then everybody else says. Mine, mine. You can read mine.
My book though, is the best one.
For sure Ms Andrason will be able to tell my library book is the best. But she still tells the class:
Anyone who wants to share their book can go quietly to their desk and get it. Then come and sit back down in the circle.
I went as fast as I could to be back and sit next to Ms Andrason. But one of the boys had just scooted over closer to her. Marcy didn’t get up and get a book to share. There is a place to sit right there next to her, now. My hair plan is gone, so I plop down in the new best spot, and the best part is she doesn’t know I want to sit next to her.
For sure Ms Andrason will see my library book is the best.
But Miss Andrason didn’t. For some reason, she couldn’t just tell my book was the best. I don’t know why. She looked at everyone’s books. I thought she was just being nice to them, like my mom giving everyone else a chance to answer the quiz question before she asked it to me. But then she didn’t pick mine anyway. Mine is the best. I can tell by the pictures-bright sweeping fast furious, adventure pictures. A girl and her horse, robbers, fast river, friendly horse rescuing her best girl, races, treasure, daring escapes, first prize.
You will each get a turn to tell everyone about your book.
I can hardly hear boys and girls showing their books and telling why they chose it, while I’m comparing the fist thing they say and the front cover, to all of how better mine is than that.
What an interesting story.
That’s a nice story you chose.
Such a sweet kitten on the cover. Is that why you chose it?
I can’t make up my mind. They are all such good stories. She smiles around at us.
She is just going to pick mine, for sure when it’s Jennifer’s turn. She’s a no fun ooh-hoo girl who giggles and whispers with a group of other ooh-hoo girls on the playground. Recognizing her now smart voice suggesting a really ooh-hoo unexciting story about some boring stuffed rabbit, shocks me. That is not her usual voice. She knows what she is talking about. It’s a dumb book though. Nothing fun happens in that dumb kind of story. Her voice, and the way she talks about a dull rabbit is like she knows. Like she knows what she is talking about.
You like horses don’t you? She is suddenly looking at me.
I nod wildly. I don’t know why I’m nodding, because, obviously, these are the best thing to like, and I do-of-course. Not liking horses or not riding the flying-off-the-seesaw-bucking bronco, that would be the wonder. Some people just are dumb. But Miss Andrason isn’t. So, I know she will pick the best book-mine, though not a word that sounds how good this book is, comes out. All its glory gets stuck in my throat. She doesn’t know mine is the best.
All of your books sound great. It’s so hard to pick one. Let me see.
Read this one! Read mine! Read….! Book names and hands go up, then wave in the air. We get louder and louder in fast controlled waves of excitement. Then it gets out of control. No, all of our books aren’t great, mine is the best is all I feel.
It feels suddenly, just like raising my hand to answer mom’s quiz questions at home. Mom finally picks me when I get loud enough to show her I know the answer to the Bible Story quiz for sure. Sometimes it seems like she can’t tell. She picks everyone else first. The more they guess, and don’t know, the more frenzied I get trying to contain it.
Miss Andrason winces. Quiet please!
She looks at me, reproving, when she says it. I’d hopped up off the floor shaking my book as high in the air, above my head as I could like a trophy, while jumping up and down shouting: Mine! Mine! Mine! Because I don’t know the name of my book.
I feel shrunken by her glance. I never want her to glance hurt or something, at me like that ever again.
Jennifer raises her hand politely. Ms Andrason. Why don’t you try eeney meeney miney moe?
I think that is a good idea. Thank you. Let’s do that.
I’m really wishing I would have suggested that good idea. I’m going to be smart and helpful faster next time.
Eenie meenie miney moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers let him go
Eenie meenie miney moe.
I know instantly what needs fixing. My hand shoots up.
Marcy’s hand goes up, too.
I can hardly wait to get this straight, but then Ms Andrason calls on her, not me.
Ms Andrason. Why don’t you say nigger?
I almost shout: That is just what I was going to say! Someone beat me to smart again! I almost wail.
This time, though, I was thinking of it. I’m about to chime in, but I can barley wait for Ms Andrason to call on me, I’m not risking her disappointment again for shouting out. I almost do burst out anyway. I would have if she hadn’t looked at me that way just now. But she is going to know that I am smart too, smart too, just like Marcie.
Marcie, go to your seat.
The air freezes my bones. A shock-freeze hits me in the face with poison air or something.
Her face is strange. I don’t recognize her. She is the weather.
The words stick me like lightning in the chest. I can’t breathe.
That was almost me. What just happened to Marcy would have happened to me. I’m saved!
It feels like the gavel banged down on my skull echoing hard smashing my bones. I am sentenced. But it’s Marcie. She looks stunned. She doesn’t swagger to her seat. She trips. She falls into her desk chair. She sits there. She sits alone like a pillar of salt.
The class sits in our circle and hears the story. Something boring about a fake rabbit, that is to long to finish.
Marcy sits there. I’m so glad Ms Andrason didn’t talk like that to me. She didn’t look at me that horrible way. I’m rescued, not in my seat while everyone else is in a circle.
After the story, Ms Andrason takes Marcy to the office. I’m terrified she will know I was just like Marcy. It would be better though once and for all if both of us where going to the office together. Not just her. I need to tell Ms Andrason how I was going to say exactly what Marcie had said. I should have been sent to my seat, too.
Ms Andrason, I was just going to say that, too. So, I’m going to my seat now. Then I go sit down in my seat in the cold poison wilderness, then get sent to the office. I have never been sent there.
My mouth almost opens over and over. My body almost gets up, the way it reached and touched Ms Andrason’s hair, but I force it back.
If she looked at me the way she just looked, I wouldn’t survive. I’d be dead-in my seat-like Marcie. My body keeps springing up. Marcie is there alone. I keep shoving me down. Marcie wouldn’t be alone there if we sat in our seats, together. I’d be there, in the ice with Marcie, not knowing why either, and it would be fair. Everything would feel worse, then everything would get better, much better…
But, I don’t move-ever.
Endless adventure-less days dragged behind and drooped ahead then, but now I’m free.
Free from boring. Free, not shut in the house all day with my little brother. And there will be lots of kinds of food, every day.
Everyone else gets home from school or work where all the fun is happening, but can’t tell me about it. It’s great to go to school, I know it, but no one can tell me exactly why. When they try to I don’t understand. I ask so much why about everything. No one answers anymore. They have adventures. I don’t. They get to do things at places I can’t go. Relished embellished tales my third grade sister Tosh spins to enchant me to envy, do.
Mom, in full regretful consternation, obeys the law. She sends us to elementary school, nothing else. I beg to go to kindergarten. She said I wouldn’t get to go even when I was old enough. No one else in our family ever goes, or would go, to kindergarten.
They don’t make kids go to kindergarten so you are not going under any circumstances. I wouldn’t send you or anyone to school at all if I didn’t have to.
What are circumstances? I wonder out loud looking back and forth from mom’s face to Tarza, fishing for an answer the best way I can in as many languages as I know, all at once to see who will help me. I need to find a way to go to kindergarten!
My oldest sister Tarza likes to and can answer almost anything. She explains in patient sing song:
Circumstances are something, that could be a good reason to go to school this year. What mom is saying is that even if there is a good reason, you are still not going to go to kindergarten, no matter what. We are against it.
All I hear is: “good reasons to go to school”.
Good reasons to go to school. I know of a whole bunch of them, and one of them has to not be the “no circumstances” one.
Something is wrong about us even going to school at all. It bothers mom like me not doing the dishes after breakfast does. But I still don’t do the dishes after breakfast when I’m told to. So, I can still go to school, in the same way, even if it bothers her. Mom does not agree.
It’s not about that. It is because school corrupts you. The danger tone switches on in her voice. She tells me about how other children have become corrupt. Some have even had to be stoned by their own parents, for it.
“Corrupted” shakes me up. Grave and scary shivers erupt on the inside. I can almost feel the ominous evil spirit trying to. I don’t want it to happen to me. I know this is bad and it can happen to me in school, mostly in kindergarten, I guess. So, I’m really glad to not risk it this afternoon.
Mom, I promise not to get corrupted, if I can go to school today!
How will you do that?
I will just not let corrupted do it to me.
How will you know what corrupted is?
Because it’s bad, so I’ll know.
The thing about getting corrupted is it’s tempting. Mom has stopped dressing and is looking at me in a sudden way. She sits me down on her lap on the bed. She never does this anymore and it feels tender nice and awkward. After a minute of balancing me on her lap she maneuvers me next to her at the edge of the bed where she can look at me. I swing my feet in the air bumping the box springs while she looks at me with a very important look. I stop swinging my legs. I’m craving important.
You want to know how corruption starts?
I nod wide eyed, knowing that however it does, it won’t, because I’m not gonna let it.
Corrupted. It is when you start to like your friends more than you like to do what God wants you to do. When you think your friends are more important than God is, the devil has you and it is almost impossible to ever get away again. You get dark minded, then you don’t even want to get away anymore. She pauses and takes a hearse breath. That’s how the devil tempts you, she sighs.
I know that my survival depends on understanding what she is saying.
He leads you astray with things you like more than you like God, and you become corrupted. She looks at my face for signs. I know this is solemn, and not time to shout how I’ll absolutely win and she has nothing to worry about!
I won’t let the devil tempt me! So, I’ll never get corrupted. I’m resolute, fierce, not smiling, only knowing and solemn. I feel solemn. It’s so much nicer than the shivers and horrors feeling.
You won’t know it’s the devil because he pretends to be good and you aren’t old enough to know the difference.
I am old enough though. Only dumb people, and bad people don’t know the difference. I can too tell what is the devil and what isn’t.
How can you tell?
I just know I can.
I’m imagining a serpent whispering for me to eat that apple. I won’t eat it though-no matter what. Then I start thinking, obviously the snake is wicked. And obviously it was Snow White’s wicked stepmother, in that old lady suit, too, that made her eat that poison apple. Snow White wasn’t as smart as I am. I’m smart enough to skip Snow White, though since mom says fairy tales are simple-minded, and corrupt and have no moral, but Eve wasn’t that smart either. And see, I know what corrupted is, too, I muse. I know which story is the right story.
I won’t get tempted like Eve did! I’m sure of it. I always double-check, make sure people aren’t the evilest ones, or the devil’s servants, and I will make sure that it’s right before I do anything.
How can you tell?
I just can.
The devil disguises himself to lie to you so you will believe it.
I tell mom how I will always not believe a lie.
How could you tell it’s a lie?
Because lies aren’t true.
Every few days a new reason pops up that hopefully wasn’t under the any circumstance clause and so would get me on the adventure bus in the mornings . I follow mom around when she gets home. Different ways, surprising times, wondering aloud about a different angle, for a loophole, and bring it up in conversations, comment about it, nag, then remind her that I still want to go, to school no matter what, too. Nothing works. But the peak of my day is the hope.
I resort. Whining, begging, weeping, screaming “It’s not fair!” and being locked in my closet till I my head pulses as hard as I have sobbed. Charm fails. Getting up and being ready for school fails. Trying to sneak on the bus failed when my own sisters didn’t let me try.
Close to the end of school, all hope isn’t lost.
Mom I will be happy to go for just whatever days are left, please, please, please! Please mommy!
Ouuuuwh! This was the wrong way to get to school, for sure because mom is suddenly madder and meaner.
You are hurting my ears. I have a headache. And I’m so, so sick and tired of you nagging and begging me all day long! Under no circumstances, whatsoever, are you to ever, ever mention school to me again. Do you hear me? One more word about school and I will spank you. One more word. Don’t even say school! Her face wrung the words. The words squeezed me dry.
The best reason yet, for me to get to go to school, is that there aren’t even enough days left for me to get corrupted anyway. The feeling jambs my thought. It squashes my breath and gives me a gripping voice ache.
Then, all is lost. The “lost and never to be” void gapes wide, dark, open, tunneling through my whole chest. My sister Tosh has fun tossing things through the tunnel.
The morning of the first day of school mom is a weird mad. I whooped a piercing triumph war-cry at the top of my lungs in the house smirking at her when she reminded me to get ready for school. She did not deliver me to the inevitable dangers of first grade that first day. When everyone else walked, she refused to take me to register.
You are not going to school today.
The second day I didn’t turn the dryer on as I was told. So my fist-day-of-school purple corduroy outfit isn’t ready in time. Mom is mean and won’t let me wear it wet.
I try to show her how it’s the second-day-of-school anyway. So what do first-day-of school- clothes matter anymore? At first she tried to explain first impressions to me, but I didn’t care about those. I just want to go to school today.
I don’t have time anymore to go by the school to register you anyway.
I howl searching for any clean not wet clothes to wear. She threatened to make good on that spanking if I don’t be quiet. And you will not be going tomorrow either. Meanwhile I couldn’t find any other clean clothes and all my underwear are shame for shame dirty. None pass school inspection without washing, and she hadn’t washed any with my outfit.
My outfit is the only thing in the dryer, she had washed it by hand quick to get the stains out. It was to be clean and dry, on time.
Remember I told you not to wear your new clothes till school started? She sighs accusing.
I did remember. But it has a big yellow flower with pretty orange trim on every petal sewn on the front. This big flower is at the bottom front and to one side. A perfect spot on the front of a blouse for a big flower just like this one to be.
I could not wait for the first day of school. I couldn’t wait or change before I went outside to show everyone then stay to play. I couldn’t wait long enough to change before I ate sloppy joes. I was too hungry.
You be a good girl or you aren’t going to school at all this year. I don’t care what the law is! Her voice hung at the end of thin rope. So did I.
On the third day of school I’m walking for the first time with my sisters. I’d imagined myself on this day skipping and whistling triamphantly. All of the “I’m free!” whipped right out of my body language though. Guarded, regretful and talking to myself in “what if’s”, and “When I’s” I lose my self in sidewalk cracks. My sisters walk on ahead and turn the corner. Lost and left behind stings my eyes. Then, up ahead, Tosh is part telling part pleading part commanding Nickie: “It’s funner this way!” But Nickie comes back and risks a peek around the corner just for fun, and gestures for me to catch up.
School is wonderful. And after a while, I discover this irresistible apple. The un-poisoned apple of desperate need to be the teacher’s pet. No one offers the apple to me. I want the apple. I poison myself with it.
Dumb Ways to Die
A Viral Video
Dumb Reason to Die
A Viral System
Die for
Freedom
Country
Love
– Dying for People
People matter so
The sacrifice matters
Makes a hero
Die for dust in the light
Die for no one’s stuffed toy
Die for nothing
Die for sins
Dumb Reasons to die
Three die
Why?
I didn’t know that when the curbs started looking cracked again I was falling out of love.
Books got more interesting.
Fault lined streets jutting tectonic plates after a quake, are old and droll again. Plunging in, jutting up, crags of street twirling streaks of tar don’t dance to me like before. Weeds growing out the unruly wild sidewalk seams, depression, not mighty, mini jungles to me.
A few weeks ago they where a sign of life of loves stories, an oasis’ in the desert concrete. When I looked at them I knew: Life, worth it beautiful, no matter what. It all says nothing to me now. A week of street perfection ago, I had smiled a wave walking through these same sidewalk jungle weeds. Imagining my hand waving as I passed felt like an actual friendly salute to this magnificent life. For the sake of possible onlookers, or myself, or for both, my inner life does it, just like I do to human people but on the inside. Waving, and nodding as I passed these green people felt natural.
From the bus window, today, they are all strange, out-of-place, depression sprung up and taking over all the way from East to Downtown.
I vaguely miss something. Like missing a friend. Empty, an echo of a vague longing, about something familiar. Something. What?
The wait for the connecting bus at Sixth and Brazos is stupid. My connection bus goes by two minutes before this bus gets there. A daily near miss. It’s on the schedule that way. This is not well planned. Sometimes I catch the connection if it is a minute or two late, or mine is just that early. A few times the bus driver flashed those special lights to flag it down. A square moving continent stops just for me to get on.
The driver smiles waving me on enthusiastically. Go on!
I skip a smiling gait all the way across the street to the hissing door re-opening for me.
Some people are nice. That stranger in a bus driver uniform saved me that dreaded forty minute wait.
Sometimes though, I just know not to bother the driver’s day any more than it already is. I try for myself to catch it. Sometimes, the hope and the possible, and the being overlooked and passed up, is too much, and too much effort, so I’d just not think about it.
I feel like some of the drivers, like not bothering with my day by trapping that bus. If it it’s there, I’ll go for it, if not, I’ll date my books. That and homework time is the bus stop. I’m slow at assignments. Completing them takes up all my time. Trying to figure out math and how to cram my thinking into small tight structures that when I squash it in one side it pops out the other is brain damaging. I’m back in grade school which I never attended anyway, feeling pretty stupid doing math, structured assignments. I work it till I get it done, mostly. It takes up all my time, at school and at tutoring though. I need this bus stop time to read, and take notes-the easy parts.
The bus stop and Sixth and Brazos, is not inviting. The bench is empty. The trash can next to it is full. This stop is one of the ones that needs a pressure wash really bad. It’s been dirty since I’ve taken these classes.
I always sit on the bench without casting around a disgusted look first. I walk up to it like it’s as safe and clean as my living room couch and plop daintily down getting comfortable, hoisting my back pack to my lap, I pull out the text-book without a second thought to the hobos standing around, right behind me.
I acknowledge them as a group, like a friend entering their parlor when I walk up. After that all homework. I’m an intense student. Usually, I talk to people wherever I am unless it’s finals or I’m lost in thought. Here, though, well, I’m gonna have to spend a lot of time. If I get friendly I won’t be free to choose what I want to do, after that. I’ll always have to say hi, then manners then small talk, not just nod and acknowledge, the way I do every day so far. They are chatty. They were carrying on the first time I walked up. I know, I need this time to study, or for myself, so I just don’t want to get into the swing with anyone. Therefore, not one word.
Summer school is almost over now. I’ve sat on this bench a few times a week this whole semester. The same people are here every day, like I’m here when I can’t catch that elusive non-connection.
People are passing, people come and go from the bus stop. Sometimes an old infirm woman or man will sit next to me. Mostly though, everyone stands away from the dirty smelly place-as far away as possible. Yeah, the place stinks like pee. Or the people do , I don’t know. It always just smells, beer and dirty and body odor.
They are all always over there, so who knows. If I sit on something nasty and smelly, that would be better than treating the people who I’m gonna have my back to, like they stink or are dirty or the bench they sleep on at night has cuties. I got to be able to relax to study. I figure they will have my back if I respect them. No faces about the smell. No scowling at the trash, or checking if the bench is clean enough for my royal butt to sit on. More than anyone, these people, I sense, need their dignity. I guess, I know how they feel.
I look up, at them, then sit down. The bus had been in sight and I ran for it. One of the bums had stepped up and hailed it for me. Drivers seem used to ignoring whatever drama is going on at my lively bus stop. Why would anyone driving a bus or otherwise think twice if a hobo runs after them shouting waving them to stop? He is insane, drunk, high, joking or dangerous, and stinks.
I felt sorry that he had exposed himself to that loss of dignity. He didn’t seem to notice. I looked a thank-you at him. He ignored me. They were always doing random things. Sometimes a hubbub, bantering, sudden laughter. A shriek of dainty mini-tag and arm bumping. Compared to the passers-by, all on their way to somewhere they have to be, their minds there already, their, bodies trying to catch up, these homeless folk with few teeth and ragged clothes held up with dirty rope, these people have a life. They feel alive, more real than the shadows floating by circling at an uncontaminated distance. A man on a phone rushes by but not to fast to watch his back on this side. People cross the street before they come to this corner if this is not their stop. Mostly, across the street phantoms are floating by, somewhere else.
The life is so different on this corner. At first I hadn’t noticed. This was like the corners in small towns and cities in Mexico, where people stop to talk and hang around. Oh, that’s called loitering. Oops. I remember the way I’d pass through the usual loitering men, on my way home from work, in the dim street lights late in the evening. I lift my body to my tallest-regal body language, look straight ahead, fearless, sweeping a gaze that catches everyone who looks for a second. Small nod. Mona Lisa smile. What cat calls?
I missed the life on the street. People just looking, noticing, talking, watching the slow crowds move conscious of each other. I had an unspoken missing of the cat calls, too, though I won’t admit that to, myself.
Don’t guys think I’m pretty anymore? I know, it’s this culture. The stupid disrespectful huddles of cat callers I so hated felt like thugs back then. But goddamn, even dolled-up the casual onlooker usually lets no response escape around here. Everyone just ignores you, or barely acknowledges you. Often they turn away on purpose. No one shows any open admiration even in the smallest glancing. When they do a double take, they re-write it like they didn’t. Sometimes it looked like it was almost just there, but not. Such relief riding the bus feels like now since when you smile, people smile back. They look again just enjoying. Not on the street though.
The hobos, there were about eight men and woman in all, they are aware and engaged with everything, in their little world, noticing the flow of everything around them. We don’t talk. But we are aware of each other and engaged. Cheerful snippets of conversation sometimes uproarious laughter ripples through the smell. Mini arguments, intense complaining, anecdotes. I noticed they tone it down when I show up and take a book out. After a while it made me smile. People. Life on this corner.
I’d show up, nod, looking up, sit down on the side of the bench closest to them, and the trash can, take out a book or a pen and notebook. I enjoy this.
One day when I showed up four police officers were giving orders to my hobos, in their own hobo spot. It’s like the cops are in my neighbor’s house, conducting an illegal search or something. Some hobos were hanging their heads and not responding. One was in a quiet firm stand up with them. He kept that defending more pleading less defying stance in front of the cops when everyone else backed off, sorta behind him. He is standing up to them. They aren’t having it. Like a giant blue python, every time he breathes out his words they wrap tighter. I see the authority winning bit by bit from across the street.
I’m seeing this from where I get off the bus walking over to our community. I see the SS rounding up the scum taking them to concentration camps to clean up the streets. Those asshole officers harassing my people, putting cuffs on the one with spirit. I stop imagining my usual routine stopping at the bench, noticing my peeps. Not making sure the cardboard on the bench isn’t dirty, turning and sitting down on it, nearest to the life on the sidewalk. My mind marches straight up to the badged assholes.
Scenarios test themselves.
Couldn’t find anyone your own size to pick on today, officer?
So, you found a great place for him to live, then? Well, then, why doesn’t he want to go?
What the fuck is going on here? This is a free country isn’t it? Oh, wait. I’m wrong. It’s not a free country.
Absently comments: Wow, look at this. Cops harassing the poorest citizens. Hmmmhh Observes, intense and obtrusive, scribbles notes. Watches, scribbles notes.
Putting my late night loitering danger gear on, I remember: What cat calls?
That’s it.
Poor bastard cops. They don’t know any better. They are no better off than the street guys. So, I don’t hear what they are saying or acting like, anymore.
I walk up. My usual deference to the occupants as I’m entering their space as a guest.
Oh, I see you have other guests as well, today.
Other guests, hello. I stand there among them. A guest at a cocktail party, Mona Lisa-ing to other guests, being present on the inside , observing on the outside. I feel like a hobo, and a cop. I might have run the hobos off, or been run off by the cops, or just been right there.
Then, everyone without further anything, just headed off in different directions. The hobo went away in handcuffs, but it didn’t seem to feel serious to anyone anymore. I had a book that needed reading, in the empty silent space. Didn’t see anything going on, after that. But a feeling of loss lingered. No more hobos for me.
I’m not looking at the words I read.
This phantom street lifeless again, had a dull inevitable thud to it.
When I get off the bus on this lifeless street the next week, I scoured for my bus praying it would be there this time. Be there, so I can just keep on going. It wasn’t. Walking dazed, following my feet with my eyes, following the feet of the person in front of me heading in my direction, I don’t have to look up for myself. Looking down at the street just feels more comfortable right now. The differences, I’ve no interest in seeing what it has now become. Just thinking it will never be the same again or something. It’s changed, it’s not safe anymore. It’s uninhabited. So, I’m going to check if there is any gum on that bench before I sit, way the hell away from that trash can.
Then, I walk into a dream. All of my hobos are here, brighter than ever. I look up at them gazing longer than usual. I smile. They carry on. I don’t look for gum, or green spit wads. I cozy up on the far side of the bench so I can turn and face more in their direction, I’m not letting the cops sneak up on’em again, while I’m here.
Sat for a while wondering, got out a book to stay in character. I usually just space out thinking between bursts of reading, anyway. This time, no reading. Why are these people here anyway?
If I looked the part, someone would be shooing me off this bench, too.
Why them, not me?
Why am I here?
Why are they there?
Why not them here, and me there?
Shock hadn’t worn off. A daze prevailed over my mind. Why are there homeless people at all? Why not just not?
Why are we so stupid that we have homeless people? I imagine a world without homeless, just people.
It gave me the creeps.
No! no! We need homeless people, this overriding protest counteracted the creeps.
What the hell? Not having homeless gives me this horrid creeppies? I’m not understanding my own mind. Not that I usually do, but it’s still uncomfortable and still takes me by surprise every time, weird illogical shit starts saying itself, or more, feeling itself. I remember a feeling in an incomprehensible short story by Ursula K LeGuin, from last semester. It had given me these creeps too.
I’d written an essay on it that I didn’t understand myself, trying to understand why I was saying “Walking Away From Amelius” was just as creepy as staying in Amelius, were they tortured one person so everyone else could have a great life. Both are freaken creepy. For once, in an English class, the story meaning had eluded me. Suddenly, it’s relevant. Why still escapes me.
The homeless situation before me is not okay. There just never being homeless, that is not okay either. Not okay and not okay…So, my mind descended into madness. In this thick breathable liquid homeless are essential. There could be nothing, as we know it, without this position filled. Like baseball without a pitcher. No homeless, no game. And I love this world. Oh, holy crap. They love this world. They love it. Way more than I do. No one forced them to be homeless. It needed to be done. Someone had to do it. No one wanted to, really. So, he volunteered.
Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go. Send me.
That one who had stood up to the cops. He was right there in my mind’s eye, reasoning with himself.
Okay someone has to clean out the sewers. I guess I could do it, since someone has got to. You guys will have a great sewer system. Enjoy your lives. I got your back.
Hey that is familiar. Oh shit. Okay, he hadn’t died for me. But this is even worse. Way, way worse, he is being a hobo for me. This guy is way more Christ than even Jesus.
No miracles, no followers, no hope, no lucky early heroic death, while knowingly obeying His Father with a purpose, while he is still handsome and has all his teeth.
This guy, hand volunteered for indefinite hopeless scorn without purpose. Just to keep the balance of things unbalanced. He did it so everyone could live. So I could live here, now, and sit on this bench wearing these heels, smiling in my makeup, snug in these fantastic fitting jeans, on my way to school, in just this world. This perfect world. This perfect Hobo world.
Oh my God. Holy shit. Magnificence strikes me. Tears whelmed up on the inside white rushing forcing through an irresistible desire, a need to bound toward him like an ecstatic puppy and bow down at his feet. To kiss his feet would be even better!
Lucky for me, I run scenarios:
I rush forward, overcome with worship, falling at his feet. Smelly dirty shoes not a part of anything I see or feel. The relief is instantaneous. Like a lover’s arms. I just need to be right here in this moment, worshiping my Hobo.
All the time, I’m staring ahead into space, semi seeing him standing there with his fellows, just being. I smile all over thanking Life for sending Him to serve me, and him for doing it willingly without asking anything in return. No guilt needed. Swaying a deep swerve into love with my life, all of it just as it is, a gracious gift from my hobo. My hobo is standing where he always stands. There on the sidewalk, the victim down cast look, defensive, roving eyes, he is shooting the shit in rags with his forlorn friends, the bottles in little brown paper sacks stashed more effectively today.
Then, my Hobo, without a word or a thought or change in his usual, walks to the curb. Without looking back, he steps onto a bus.
Books got more interesting.
Fault lined streets jutting tectonic plates after a quake, are old and droll again. Plunging in, jutting up, craggs of street twirling streaks of tar don’t dance to me like before. Weeds growing out the unruly wild sidewalk seams, depression, not mighty, mini jungles to me.
A few weeks ago they where a sign of life of loves stories, an oasis’ in the desert concrete. When I looked at them I knew: Life, worth it beautiful, no matter what. It all says nothing to me now. A week of street perfection ago, I had smiled a wave walking through these same sidewalk jungle weeds. Imagining my hand waving as I passed felt like an actual friendly salute to this magnificent life. For the sake of possible onlookers, or myself, or for both, my inner life does it, just like I do to human people but on the inside. Waving, and nodding as I passed these green people felt natural.
From the bus window, today, they are all strange, out-of-place, depression sprung up and taking over all the way from East to Downtown.
I vaguely miss something. Like missing a friend. Empty, an echo of a vague longing, about something familiar. Something. What?
The wait for the connecting bus at Sixth and Brazos is stupid. My connection bus goes by two minutes before this bus gets there. A daily near miss. It’s on the schedule that way. This is not well planned. Sometimes I catch the connection if it is a minute or two late, or mine is just that early. A few times the bus driver flashed those special lights to flag it down. A square moving continent stops just for me to get on.
The driver smiles waving me on enthusiastically. Go on!
I skip a smiling gait all the way across the street to the hissing door re-opening for me.
Some people are nice. That stranger in a bus driver uniform saved me that dreaded forty minute wait.
Sometimes though, I just know not to bother the driver’s day any more than it already is. I try for myself to catch it. Sometimes, the hope and the possible, and the being overlooked and passed up, is too much, and to much effort, so I’d just not think about it.
I feel like some of the drivers, like not bothering with my day by trapping that bus. If it it’s there, I’ll go for it, if not, I’ll date my books. That and homework time is the bus stop. I’m slow at assignments. Completing them takes up all my time. Trying to figure out math and how to cram my thinking into small tight structures that when I squash it in one side it pops out the other is brain damaging. I’m back in grade school which I never attended anyway, feeling pretty stupid doing math, structured assignments. I work it till I get it done, mostly. It takes up all my time, at school and at tutoring though. I need this bus stop time to read, and take notes-the easy parts.
The bus stop and Sixth and Brazos, is not inviting. The bench is empty. The trash can next to it is full. This stop is one of the ones that needs a pressure wash really bad. It’s been dirty since I’ve been taking these classes.
I always sit on the bench without casting around a disgusted look first. I walk up to it like it’s as safe and clean as my living room couch and plop daintily down getting comfortable, hoisting my back pack to my lap, I pull out the text-book without a second thought to the hobos standing around, right behind me.
I acknowledge them as a group, like a friend entering their parlor when I walk up. After that all homework. I’m an intense student. Usually, I talk to people wherever I am unless it’s finals or I’m lost in thought. Here, though, well, I’m gonna have to spend a lot of time. If I get friendly I won’t be free to choose what I want to do, after that. I’ll always have to say hi, then manners then small talk, not just nod and acknowledge, the way I do every day so far. They are chatty. They were carrying on the first time I walked up. I know, I need this time to study, or for myself, so I just don’t want to get into the swing with anyone. Therefore, not one word.
Summer school is almost over now. I’ve sat on this bench a few times a week this whole semester. The same people are here every day, like I’m here when I can’t catch that elusive non-connection.
People are passing, people come and go from the bus stop. Sometimes an old infirm woman or man will sit next to me. Mostly though, everyone stands away from the dirty smelly place-as far away as possible. Yeah, the place stinks like pee. Or the people do , I don’t know. It always just smells, beer and dirty and body odor.
They are all always right over there, so who knows. If I sit on something nasty and smelly, that would be better than treating the people who I’m gonna have my back to, like they stink or are dirty or the bench they sleep on at night has cuties. I must be able to relax to study. I figure they will have my back if I respect them. No faces about the smell. No scowling at the trash, or checking if the bench is clean enough for my royal butt to sit on. More than anyone, these people, I sense, need their dignity. I guess, I know how they feel.
I look up, at them, then sit down. The bus had been in sight and I ran for it. One of the bums had stepped up and hailed it for me. Drivers must be used to ignoring whatever drama is going on at my lively bus stop. Why would anyone driving a bus or otherwise think twice if a hobo runs after them shouting waving them to stop? He is insane, drunk, high, joking or dangerous, and stinks.
I felt sorry that he had exposed himself to that loss of dignity. He didn’t seem to notice. I looked a thank-you at him. He ignored me. They were always doing random things. Sometimes a hubbub, bantering, sudden laughter. A shriek of dainty mini-tag and arm bumping. Compared to the passers-by, all on their way to somewhere they have to be, their minds there already, their, bodies trying to catch up, these homeless folk with few teeth and ragged clothes held up with dirty rope, these people have a life. They feel alive, more real than the shadows floating by circling at an uncontaminated distance. A man on a phone rushes by but not to fast to watch his back on this side. People cross the street before they come to this corner if this is not their stop. Mostly, across the street phantoms are floating by, somewhere else.
The life is so different on this corner. At first I hadn’t noticed. This was like the corners in small towns and cities in Mexico, where people stop to talk and hang around. Oh, that’s called loitering. Oops. I remember the way I’d pass through the usual loitering men, on my way home from work, in the dim street lights late in the evening. I lift my body to my tallest-regal body language, look straight ahead, fearless, sweeping a gaze that catches everyone who looks for a second. Small nod. Mona Lisa smile. What cat calls?
I missed the life on the street. People just looking, noticing, talking, watching the slow crowds move conscious of each other. I had an unspoken missing of the cat calls, too, though I won’t admit that to, myself.
Don’t guys think I’m pretty anymore? I know, it’s this culture. The stupid disrespectful huddles of cat callers I so hated felt like thugs back then. But goddamn, even dolled-up the casual onlooker usually lets no response escape around here. Everyone just ignores you, or barely acknowledges you. Often they turn away on purpose. No one shows any open admiration even in the smallest glancing. When they do a double take, they re-write it like they didn’t. Sometimes it looked like it was almost just there, but not. Such relief riding the bus feels like now since when you smile, people smile back. They look again just enjoying. Not on the street though.
The hobos, there were about eight men and woman in all, they are aware and engaged with everything, in their little world, noticing the flow of everything around them. We don’t talk. But we are aware of each other and engaged. Cheerful snippets of conversation sometimes uproarious laughter ripples through the smell. Mini arguments, intense complaining, anecdotes. I noticed they tone it down when I show up and take a book out. After a while it made me smile. People. Life on this corner.
I’d show up, nod, looking up, sit down on the side of the bench closest to them, and the trash can, take out a book or a pen and notebook. I enjoy this.
One day when I showed up four police officers were giving orders to my hobos, in their own hobo spot. It’s like the cops are in my neighbor’s house, conducting an illegal search or something. Some hobos were hanging their heads and not responding. One was in a quiet firm stand up with them. He kept that defending more pleading less defying stance in front of the cops when everyone else backed off, sorta behind him. He is standing up to them. They aren’t having it. Like a giant blue python, every time he breathes out his words they wrap tighter. I see the authority winning bit by bit from across the street.
I’m seeing this from where I get off the bus walking over to our community. I see the SS rounding up the scum taking them to concentration camps to clean up the streets. Those asshole officers harassing my people, putting cuffs on the one with spirit. I stop imagining my usual routine stopping at the bench, noticing my peeps. Not making sure the cardboard on the bench isn’t dirty, turning and sitting down on it, nearest to the life on the sidewalk. My mind marches straight up to the badged assholes.
Scenarios test themselves.
Couldn’t find anyone your own size to pick on today, officer?
So, you found a great place for him to live, then? Well, then, why doesn’t he want to go?
What the fuck is going on here? This is a free country isn’t it? Oh, wait. I’m wrong. It’s not a free country.
Absently comments: Wow, look at this. Cops harassing the poorest citizens. Hmmmhh Observes, intense and obtrusive, scribbles notes. Watches, scribbles notes.
Putting my late night loitering danger gear on, I remember: What cat calls?
That’s it.
Poor bastard cops. They don’t know any better. They are no better off than the street guys. So, I don’t hear what they are saying or acting like, anymore.
I walk up. My usual deference to the occupants as I’m entering their space as a guest.
Oh, I see you have other guests as well, today.
Other guests, hello. I stand there among them. A guest at a cocktail party, Mona Lisa-ing to other guests, being present on the inside , observing on the outside. I feel like a hobo, and a cop. I might have run the hobos off, or been run off by the cops, or just been right there.
Then, everyone without further anything, just headed off in different directions. The hobo went away in handcuffs, but it didn’t seem to feel serious to anyone anymore. I had a book that needed reading, in the empty silent space. Didn’t see anything going on, after that. But a feeling of loss lingered. No more hobos for me.
I’m not looking at the words I read.
This phantom street lifeless again, had a dull inevitable thud to it.
When I get off the bus on this lifeless street the next week, I scoured for my bus praying it would be there this time. Be there, so I can just keep on going. It wasn’t. Walking dazed, following my feet with my eyes, following the feet of the person in front of me heading in my direction, I don’t have to look up for myself. Looking down at the street just feels more comfortable right now. The differences, I’ve no interest in seeing what it has now become. Just thinking it will never be the same again or something. It’s changed, it’s not safe anymore. It’s uninhabited. So, I’m going to check if there is any gum on that bench before I sit, way the hell away from that trash can.
Then, I walk into a dream. All of my hobos are here, brighter than ever. I look up at them gazing longer than usual. I smile. They carry on. I don’t look for gum, or green spit wads. I cozy up on the far side of the bench so I can turn and face more in their direction, I’m not letting the cops sneak up on’em again, while I’m here.
Sat for a while wondering, got out a book to stay in character. I usually just space out thinking between bursts of reading, anyway. This time, no reading. Why are these people here anyway?
If I looked the part, someone would be shooing me off this bench, too.
Why them, not me?
Why am I here?
Why are they there?
Why not them here, and me there?
Shock hadn’t worn off. A daze prevailed over my mind. Why are there homeless people at all? Why not just not?
Why are we so stupid that we have homeless people? I imagine a world without homeless, just people.
It gave me the creeps.
No! no! We need homeless people, this overriding protest counteracted the creeps.
What the hell? Not having homeless gives me this horrid creeppies? I’m not understanding my own mind. Not that I usually do, but it’s still uncomfortable and still takes me by surprise every time, weird illogical shit starts saying itself, or more, feeling itself. I remember a feeling in an incomprehensible short story by Ursula K LeGuin, from last semester. It had given me these creeps too.
I’d written an essay on it that I didn’t understand myself, trying to understand why I was saying “Walking Away From Amelius” was just as creepy as staying in Amelius, were they tortured one person so everyone else could have a great life. Both are freaken creepy. For once, in an English class, the story meaning had eluded me. Suddenly, it’s relevant. Why still escapes me.
The homeless situation before me is not okay. There just never being homeless, that is not okay either. Not okay and not okay…So, my mind descended into madness. In this thick breathable liquid homeless are essential. There could be nothing, as we know it, without this position filled. Like baseball without a pitcher. No homeless, no game. And I love this world. Oh, holy crap. They love this world. They love it. Way more than I do. No one forced them to be homeless. It needed to be done. Someone had to do it. No one wanted to, really. So, he volunteered.
Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go. Send me.
That one who had stood up to the cops. He was right there in my mind’s eye, reasoning with himself.
Okay someone has to clean out the sewers. I guess I could do it, since someone has got to. You guys will have a great sewer system. Enjoy your lives. I got your back.
Hey that is familiar. Oh shit. Okay, he hadn’t died for me. But this is even worse. Way, way worse, he is being a hobo for me. This guy is way more Christ than even Jesus.
No miracles, no followers, no hope, no lucky early heroic death, while knowingly obeying His Father with a purpose, while he is still handsome and has all his teeth.
This guy, hand volunteered for indefinite hopeless scorn without purpose. Just to keep the balance of things unbalanced. He did it so everyone could live. So I could live here, now, and sit on this bench wearing these heels, smiling in my makeup, snug in these fantastic fitting jeans, on my way to school, in just this world. This perfect world. This perfect Hobo world.
Oh my God. Holy shit. Magnificence strikes me. Tears whelmed up on the inside white rushing forcing through an irresistible desire, a need to bound toward him like an ecstatic puppy and bow down at his feet. To kiss his feet would be even better!
Lucky for me, I run scenarios:
I rush forward, overcome with worship, falling at his feet. Smelly dirty shoes not a part of anything I see or feel. The relief is instantaneous. Like a lover’s arms. I just need to be right here in this moment, worshiping my Hobo.
All the time, I’m staring ahead into space, semi seeing him standing there with his fellows, just being. I smile all over thanking Life for sending Him to serve me, and him for doing it willingly without asking anything in return. No guilt needed. Swaying a deep swerve into love with my life, all of it just as it is, a gracious gift from my hobo. My hobo is standing where he always stands. There on the sidewalk, the victim down cast look, defensive, roving eyes, he is shooting the shit in rags with his forlorn friends, the bottles in little brown paper sacks stashed more effectively today.
Then, my Hobo, without a word or a thought or change in his usual, walks to the curb. Without looking back, he steps onto a bus.
I’m slowing up just a little before the bumpy railroad tracks. No flashing RR crossing lights catch me today. I look far ahead left at the tracks swerving back into a wild place where the train comes from. Only trains ever comes from there. No train is coming, I’ll hop right through.
I’ve caught up to an ambulance just ahead of me, now. I’m blowing right through here as usual.
The ambulance slows down. Do ambulances stop at all railroad crossings? I don’t remember. Maybe this driver knows about that bump in his lane. I don’t stop at railroad crossings. I catch right up now. I am gonna pass.
I’m riding right into the ambulance’s blind spot about to pass it up when those mighty emergency lights flash on.
Automatic reaction, I hit the brakes and stop. A biker is pedaling across my lane from behind the ambulance.
I don’t know what that biker was thinking.
The emergency lights switch right back off.
I almost ran the next light when it hits me.
The ambulance driver was thinking.
Daggers
In the heart
Kill
The Anti-Christ
To free
The Christ beneath
Another way
To find Christ alive
That doesn’t work
I think
The Christ is inside me
Why look around-
Were then, would
The Anti-Christ be?
Who returns first,
Again?
Intimate with Death
Celebrating life
Embrace Death
Cherish tender memories
A note to a departed
A candle lit for
Beloved taken, gentle Taker
Dark vs Light
Brother vs Brother
Evil is to fight
It’s hard to tell if my conscience is more like a tar baby, or more like a hand rail.
Maybe it’s a tar covered hand rail. A handrail along the straight and narrow that get’s me all sticky, and glued to it. I’m wondering if my conscience is meant to keep me on my path, or meant to keep me stuck.
Or, it may be meant for something totally different, perhaps outdated, or just very basic.
Conscience must be one of those special use tools. It’s like a hammer. It works real good for nails, but not for scraping ice off a windshield. Or a tool like the weather station, which may predict hurricanes, and tornadoes, but isn’t any help with earthquakes or volcanos.
If I count only on this conscience of mine to guide me, I still get into trouble, and karma. I stay stuck. Or even dig myself in deeper trying to defend it.
It seems my conscience plays by the rules I already know. It does not cover what my consciousness doesn’t cover. Whatever my consciousness is, so is my conscience. If my consciousness is narrow, so is my conscience.
By narrow, I mean it has a small umbrella, doesn’t cover much. I can do everything wicked outside my umbrella without a pang. It’s how, when I’m a soldier, under orders, committing murder somehow doesn’t equal murder. That’s conscience for you. It plays.
Or maybe it’s following some life purpose or blueprint like what I came to learn or perhaps what I learned in a past life didn’t work. I don’t think it covers what I haven’t, at some time, already learned.
As I grow, so does my conscience. I have to believe something is wrong for my conscience to work me. It doesn’t function with what anyone else believes. It only works with what I feel, and believe is right or wrong. When my beliefs change, so does my conscience. I don’t have a conscience, without something to base it on. No one has the same conscience, I guess.
So, now, I’m only counting on it for what I already know, or have known, sometime.
The unexplored worlds beyond my present experience, for these, I figure, my heart knows, and will know what is right for me. My feet know their path, too. They can keep me on my straight and narrow: straight, because it is always the step straight ahead. It’s narrow, because only I fit on it. My path is only mine. My heart figures stuff out, then tells my conscience. That’s how I must have come to have some conscience so far.
I learn by experience, vicarious or otherwise. My personal conscience also seems to be made up of what I’m taught, when I actually believe it. If I don’t believe it or feel it, no conscience for that one. If I believe a lie, then my conscience may bug me for something like walking barefoot, or telling the truth.
Until my conscience grows up, I’m dangerous.
A wild-eyed, grinning toddler.
A Mystical Shop. I’m in the middle of row and shelves eagerly shopping for karma.
The image drifted down like a big red leaf in the fall. I reach out and catch it in mid-air.
Hello leaf.
What do I do with you?
Its bright golden orange, rimmed in red, cut edged perfect symmetry, intricate design. The ground is not covered in leaves. The leaves high above in the magnificent canopy aren’t flaming.
This one fell to me.
At home, it has a place on my altar. It lives there quietly till it grows into visions of Quest Shopping. Eager, calculating planning choosing like an avid gamer.
Character building. Challenge selecting. selecting a sport, taking sides, building teams, training, evolving the rules of engagement, looking forward to the trials, tests of strength, the growth qualifying for the championships.
The bending of the rules. Braking the rules. Winning. Cheating. Prize. Losing. Playing. To die. Playing again. Trying again. Leveling up. Finishing quests. Making friends. Making enemies. Seeing our friends die. Being rescued. Creating new stories. Reliving the good old stories.
The World
Our game set ups are as ingenious diverse creative and engaging as our movies and our t.v. shows our art and letters, architecture and fashion. What world? What challenges, what rules and constraints. Which limitations? What do you want to learn? What to understand, to strengthen, to redo? What will you do over, to achieve?
Reality might be made of the answers.
Could be.
Shrill piercing howl puppy whine.
Ha! They got it!
There they go, I’d pointed furiously silent. I’d signaled with my arm toward the sprinting pack of four evil dogs. He had been coming toward the house were I was.
He turned back around toward were I pointed. I can’t shoot that way he signaled back. There is nothing to stop the bullets. The neighbors, you know.
The dogs scattered. The shot rang out from the other direction. Friendly neighbors. They look out for us. Then, that terrible puppy in pain yapping pierced everything.
Those four goat wounding, chicken snatching, kitty killers in the pack, keep looting our fenced yard animals.
The white laying hen narrowly escaped, but her tail feathers hadn’t. The chicks didn’t. The golden, hen and her chicks didn’t.
We rescued Daisy. She was the slowest the smallest of our little goats. Those dogs had her surrounded. They were snapping at her furry legs when we reached the hysterical barking, and bleating. We ran to her, ran shouting those predators away.
Three dogs escaped.
A smallish black, and white border collie mix flinches in a horrid way, filling the stillness between shots with this squashed puppy, shrill howl.
Even saying “border-collie-mix” crams my heart in my shrinking throat.
Nothing feels safer.
I feel worse.
Can’t watch this puppy massacre.
Can’t watch them tear up the other animals, either.
Those bad dogs had caught, and tore up the half-grown kittens in the middle of the night. That piercing yawall of caught, crushed kitty, from the night before, it echoes- a scream going on and on.
I need this unbearable sound to stop. We’d found the tiny white once silky body torn up out near the pond. Not fluffy.
A dead little border collie mix, all black white and furry, doesn’t make it better. I can’t look back there.
It’s worse! I know what it looks like, what that puppy looks like, while I”m running away. I’m worse. The world is worse. There is no hope for any of us!
Weeping, running away, I’m seeing the little thing flinch, and whimper. It squealed just like Skinny Bones squealed under the bump of the pick-up truck tires.
He had fallen, gotten up, run a few steps, just enough so my heart rises up. Then fell to his side, irrevocably still. Thud.
That thud, I fled from it.
But, it didn’t flee from me. It must have happened while I was running to the house, out of control, tears streaming through the air behind me. Two more shots, thud. It happened. The thud was worse when I imagine it.
Thud.
This thud, infinitely worse than the torn up stiff bodies of kittens; more desolate than the missing hens; sadder than no more chicks.
He comes back with a firm step.
We did it! Don’t think those damn dogs will be back here on our land messing with our animals again.
I’m defeated. These are puppies, and chickies.
There is no solution. I can’t see.
There is no hope. It’s woman and children dying, and being defended by fathers, and brothers of dogs, and men turning mothers into widows, and children into survivors.
My kind, we haven’t even managed to make peace for pets.
((((
THUD!
))))
waywardspirit 
