Thursday, January 5, 2012

::Wrapping::

  The shades of yesterday don't hold me tight. I wash my hair. I let the scabs on my face fall, and am undisturbed by much. There is an empty tinge to the looking back these days. Perhaps in winter I freeze my excess away. I let the world know things that will shut me out of it. I act silently. I say little and much all at the same time. I make myself the bad one for you to to cut off. I let you hate me because it will keep you away. I let you hate me because it's easier than thinking about what it is you do, are, and are about. There is a time for caring. There is a time to caress. There is a time to push everything else aside and just be the security blanket. I am hard and warm like crystal. I know what I have been to you.
   I have a way of letting the world forget itself. Forget what it wants, what it was doing, what I mean to it. I have a way of giving myself up to create a comfort cave for others. As time and relationship and love all create this spiral of me I am still growing. Layer under layer under layer there is still more me. More ways to love, and relate. More ways to stick by as the time stretches itself out between us. Things can happen in the middle. Somewhere between the hours and the days I begin to chime. The alarm bells begin to ting.
  The desire for sameness turns my head around. I can't be the same thing twice. I can express the same thought in the same way more than once. I can't be this creature that stops peeling the layers because there is so much more of me that needs to be let out. The skins of my past will constantly unfurl themselves. Opening themselves up to the new. New ways to love and relate. New ways to lose myself. New ways to see yesterday.
   In life we are all betrayers. We pray and hope for longevity. We crave the steady job, a constant care, loves that don't die, friends that stay best forever. We crave the simplicity of forever. That all we know will always be there and be the same. That we have something just ours that signifies what we are worth in the world in a way that doesn't change. I get cold and harder edged. Forever isn't something I crave. I crave the knowing. The honest moment. The real. What's real is that all things change. What's real is that I made a choice one night. I chose to stop loving you the way I did. I don't need sameness, but fairness would be kind. As I pull out the layers and layers of me, of the past, of the truth it made things easier. It makes all this true. I can stop. I have stopped. I have washed you out of me.
    The stains of what was our life will never sparkle, and they shouldn't. I try to hold the parts of you that are clear and perfect. I try to hold the parts of us that are truly love and transcendent. A new year hits things hard. I rinse my scabs everyday. I wear them out, unbandaged to feel the sting of the cold air. I've never been really good at holding on to many people. I am gifted at letting them make me the villain. I do what I can to let them hate me at the end, so they don't have to face my truths, my words, my judgement. I let them define the time to go, so I can slip away and forget. Forget everything that we were and are in the world. Forget the feelings, the history, the life of whatever we did, were doing, would ever possibly do.
   I wrap myself up, in layer upon layer of me. It's an emotional hibernation of sorts. The comfort of my own coolness pleases me. My eyes turn wistful and inwardly dreamy. I'll cocoon myself inside myself and redraw my heartlines. I will be new again when the scabs all fall away. I'll have no memory of what mattered today because tomorrow there will be more. More time, more love, more ways to relate in the newness beneath these layers.

Monday, December 5, 2011

::Maneuvers::

::Tick and Tock::

   Time is the maker. The days spill forward and we move out. There is this eternal tick and tock. It silently rattles at the tips of the fingers. It links around each toe and makes the eyes at once heavy and yet awake. I've never been good at keeping time. I've never been good at keeping things close to my chest. My fingers get cold at the tips.They tuck themselves into a set of pockets and with a shoulder lift they press in close to the body and are moved on. Lead forward by the toe connected foot, with the ankle turning sideways or plainly away from things that fail to stay warm.  The passage of time is bewildering. I can feel the change, feel my motivations in some areas get stronger and others just fall away unimportant. I've never been quite sure what it is I am capable of. I am good at stretching myself out and testing things.
    I test their solidity. I test their verve. Their resolve. I envelope around the faces and facts I find interesting or amusing. As a child I tinkered with the ideas and consciousness of others. I whispered temptations in their ear, dared them to jump fire ropes and lead them anywhere they'd seemed afraid to go. I feared others then. I feared the world around me. I found myself trapped in an arena of youth with very little to play with and very little that seemed in my control. I grew upwards as we all do. I stopped playing. I grew quiet. I disappeared. I left myself, my head, my own consciousness. I was haunted by shapes and shades with no will or resolve of my own. I became a survivalist. I spent my nights hunting realities that weren't real and weren't mine.
    Time passes always ticking the nerves...I can't live in delusion so somehow I wake myself up. I find myself in a place of lack. I lack identity. I lack substance. I lack my own verve. I begin again. Plodding through shades and shadows of me I can't remember or don't recognize. I spend my days drowning and alone. I martyred myself then. Threw myself into demonstrating and giving and constancy in giving and spreading and being for others because I had no spirit for myself. I had no solid self to be. I become a mimic. I become a mime. I paint my face with the colors of others because it's easy to play pretend. It's easy to sleep alone when tranquilized. It's easy to bury yourself when your time in body is graven and empty.
    Time becomes a tomb. Existing in pieces easily broken up by wild nights and drugs and dreams of things so simple that you can't be touched by truth. One day an alarm goes off. You wake up again. Somehow you're ready. Sometime when you weren't looking you filled yourself up and you breathe into yourself and feel you breathing. Feel you being, and at this point you know nothing is the same...but you play pretend some more because you aren't ready to get up. You frighten yourself. Your possibilities are frightening. So you let yourself be a slave to the experience of others to take the time away...to waste the time. You cover up your fullness and you get taken. You get taken advantage of. Someone comes with a soft sided glove to make you close your eyes. Then their iron fist breaks itself deep on your heart and takes your choices away.
   As the chest piece caves itself in I wake up again. I abandon my body, my broken heart, my empty choices and the shattered mask I still can't put down. I cultivated nothing but my own aloneness. I learn how to avoid leaning on anyone. I learn how to give and withhold and love and be loved with my hand up dictating the arms length distance I always keep. I learn the beauty of tears and the pleasures of being hazy. I learn to wear a veil. I let the world see through to the surface because I know I need it. I need it to exist, but I can't love it fully. My heart becomes wrapped in steely tension lines. Cold and thorny and pressing into the flesh continually to remind me not to trust. Not to let go. Not to open up.
   I become a bubble thing. Insulated by the pleasures of separation and the slight ability for genius on a reachable level to operate automatically in the world around and about me but never let it in. Never let it into my own. I don't know if it is time that made it. I don't know if I innately was always making this world so rich, and deep, and endless that I am sometimes scared to sleep because I think it will swallow me whole. That I won't come back. That I won't wake up and never have given myself the chance to cultivate something outside of my endlessness. If time is a reconciler it is quite tricksy.
  The past is an easy map to maneuver because it's already happened. The future is so far removed that I barely think on it but the present unwraps itself everyday. Unfolding surprises we don't expect because we feel we are fully under our own control. Something happens. A click, a whistle, a tick and tock inside that punches holes in our stories and sticks pins through our patterns. We wake up again. I never felt lucky when this happens because there is always a loss. A loss of an identifier we became used to. The loss of a story we liked to live by. We lose a sense of what is absolute.
  For me, sometimes those losses seem huge because I have given up my identity so many times that I hold what I know very close to me. I have a hard time keeping things close to my chest once there has been a turn around. Though this turn brings out my blueness and melancholic tendency I rattle at the bones and find a way to move forwards. Perhaps this is time as desire. Letting go of my old skins and dreams for newer realities and temperatures.
  There is a fear here. Deep and wide and seemingly endless, like the world I've made at the core of me. I dig my hands deep in my pockets, I look upward and out and silently hope to myself to stay awake this time as I move forward. Afraid of others or afraid of me or afraid of the world as it were, but if I can keep my dreaming self even half awake I might just cultivate that reality I so desire to have. Something I can look back on whenever my time begins to run out and see it's full beauty and the endlessness beneath and to be pleased to know that it truly was all mine.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

::Earth Signs::

::Sacraments in Blue::

  A monumental occurrence a few weeks back is remembered tonight. Memory is where I begin to let all of it go. Life has a tendency to happen. Not the life we live everyday, but the musical life. The pacing of heart strings. The staccato of taking the steps towards something big. Something real and removed from the maudlin melodies of our everyday. I love to dance. I live for music and the musicality of moments, of life, of being. We all have our strengths. We all have our methods. We all have our fall back graces.
   I have been told that I change the air where I go. I bring with me a natural ease of being, of voice, of openness. I am a free form bridge to whatever melody I happen to pick up and put my hands on. This day, it was you. Everything starts innocently enough doesn't it? A barrage of conversation to intrigue, to invite, to line up the possible, to lie about our intentions. Days speed steady and then I arrive.
   You open the door to your home, your world, your heart without realizing it yet. I glaze over, to hide all this from myself. I never know if I'm interested in more than what makes me curious. The sound of the new and unfamiliar, the novelty of fresh company, of an unknown body of compositions still unplayed and unspoiled. Tonight, it was you and I was surprised. Your sounds matched mine beat by beat and note by note. The chords were struck heavy and hard. A natural ease spread between us like sugar powder falling on the folds of an irresistible cake. I do have a sweet tooth.
   There is something very familiar about all this...but I brush it off and focus on the new. I have a particular way about me. I sit still, I speak evenly, I give very little but spread something deep into the air. It opens your your chest, relaxes, strokes, lays you open. A melody unregistered, not played intentionally, but it is there. It folds out under our words, the outstretching of our fingers, through the scales of our stories and the comfort that builds between our bodies. Tonight, it's us.
   The hours race by. It's getting later and later and we are ready to sleep. The scent of blue roses haunts your room. A smell I am very familiar with from a magic I know very well. The smell and sound of smoke and breath and laughter soaks the spaces between your fingers with sadness. The sadness is my own. I let you kiss me. We roll around. I am not breaking any of my rules. We are lit up by a blue light shining out from the center of the bed. The bed becomes a temple. It seals the beginning of our composition. We are really here. We are really feeling something. I've really done it now.
   Through your bodies pulses and pressings you are hot like cinders freezing in the blue. The sadness strikes me solidly. My skin flushes with goosebumps and anticipation as you release a sea of moist notes. They seal the end of things in the body, the beginning of things in the heart, that then begin the focus of your eyes on me. The scent of blue roses hangs itself heavy with silence and mood. You look at me now, with deepness. I betray myself with agreements. I only speak the truth. I am here. I am here with you now. There is always that place beneath that knows I am a creature hard to secure. I know it's there, and I think you do too.
   I do love the way you feel. Your eyes. Your hands. Your kisses. All of this makes me comfortable because attractions I am good at. Desires are easy. They aren't fixed. I know how to charm, create a world of fire and mystery and curiosity. I try not to see where this is going. I try not to hear all our inner connections playing out for each other because there is so much more happening than either of us want or expect.
   The magical blue knew before I did. I didn't for a second see this coming. The room's ablaze in blue. It is a testament to need. We lay bare and intertwined and together because that night it was only us. The light at the center of the room becomes a blanket and in it I let myself fall in a way I've never really let myself fall before. I close my eyes listening to a symphony of your snores. I sink into the calm and forget the sadness that hangs in the air. We lay bare, intertwined, and together in a room of blue. All these blue visions, blue dreams, and that blue light. We are centered and surrounded by it. We sleep inside the eye of the hurricane and whether we knew it then or not everything had been illuminated.
  

Thursday, October 27, 2011

::Facing::

::Hands::

   The conditions of my conditioning lack focus. I am full of blurred lines and bottomless hope. I've never really gotten involved in anything. I have a talent for floating. I give the importance to others. I breathe when I am close and that breath gives the illusion of weight. I am a constant mover. I hover over many spaces at the same time ready at any moment to drop my hands. To fold at the table of life and of love because the illusion of freedom satisfies. Each breath becomes a dance. The bluff, the mask, the conversation, the dream.
   I play with a full deck that tends to switch suits. The jokers are wild and I become flush with fools and foolishly I hold this hand steady. I give myself the room to be tempted to make the quick decision. I give myself the room to make the wrong choice. I give myself the permission to take the easy way out. I lick my lips and smile. Put on my bravest face and gingerly excuse myself from the table. I decide I don't like the game. The pace is too slow. The chatter of the other players grates the nerves or feels like an anchor of complications too heavy to chain myself to.
   I've been known to champion the losing odds. To stay on ships faithfully when I know they are built to sink. I carry the foolish knack for wasting time, or losing time because I can lose myself so easily. If I breathe deeply enough I'll get lost in the sound and tempo of the air. I can watch the ocean and become it for awhile. I can turn away and pull you into me all at the same time. There are all these feelings. They flow like rivers burnt by the past. The mistakes that sunk deep and scarred, the things I chose instead, the things I can never forget, the armor I decorate fresh and fully everyday.
   These feelings dance like my own shadow. The faint flicker of movement I try to hide myself in. Worlds of words and emptiness with so much promise. I paint myself in the colors of the flame. I pull the blue center out and blanket myself in it's center. As my pulse rushes the heat begins create something bigger. Something that isn't just mine anymore. I feel myself choosing. I hear myself say Yes! Yes I choose you...I can have you...Yes. The word echoes as I spark all over. The taste of skin soaked in fantasy spreads behind my eyes. I lay glazed in lacy moods and purity. The purity of the this me.
   This me full of desires. This me that's wanting to be close. The one that wants something bigger that isn't just mine to choose. I shiver and shrink. My impulses can lead me into things I can't forget. There are things I can barely remember that become whispers on my frame. Lightly stinging the spaces between my fingers because I held the wrong cards so long they've sliced clean through. I can be my own trick. I move in dreams as currency, like breathing, they are my existence and my home. I seek out the real experience. I am attracted to it's flux and unsteadiness. I let it see me. I stand in front of it a smiling mirage. I am so light and uninvolved and delicate like the candles flame. I let it choose me.
   Choices are made quickly. I wrap myself up in the experience. My body soaks in every word, breath, heartbeat until I am so deeply inside the shape of things I can almost get lost in it. I heat up with fever and the desire for more. It is here where I get nervous. I look around for that solitary space where I can see the idea of freedom at all times. I look for the window as things begin to flare up. I hastily throw it open and let all the cold air fill this shape with distance. I look for reasons to drop my hands, to disappear, to pull away.
   The joker is wild. The wild card is unpredictable. The space to love gets clouded by you and me and everything else that has happened before we were anything. Before we were bodies in the same room, or conversations on the telephone line. I spend most of my life passing time with nothing and no one. I live with the shades and shadows of myself like branches on a tree. I can separate from each and every part at anytime and I let all this happens now. I twist and turn away because I want to burn. I want to get lost in the flames and forget all I have ever learned, all I have ever been and all these games I have overplayed.
    I realize that yes, I can want you. Yes, you can be something. Yes, we can do this. I don't know how to drop my hands. I don't know how to handle the heat or let myself be fully involved. I don't know how to be in the space for loving and not try to make my own separate space at the same time. I am tired of all my company. The nothing and no ones I pass my time with. I have to pull myself out of the shade and just let something happen. Something bigger than myself can happen and it won't just be up to me choose. It won't just be mine...it will be something new. It will be OURS.