So Long Baby of Love
21 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Poems Tags: Childhood lost, Don Henley, Teenage angst
I’d trade everything for this:
One last last childhood adventure. One last unbreakable dream. Send me back to ignorance. This can’t be my last innocent dream. Because love is the greatest playground. I’ll stay right here and scream “Go slow.” This won’t become a haze of flashbacks that I cannot unwind.
The meaning of bliss starts to fade and passion takes its place. Every breath takes me farther away from the days when all I could long for was some perfect kiss. Tumbling through grass and flowers is replaced by tumbles between sheets of weakness. And scraped knees heal faster than wounded hearts that never stop their bleeding.
The claims we made were more sensible than the lies we make… and believe. Writing over rough drafts to life that get wrinkled and tossed away I’m realizing it was easier to dream. I could be wrong but I’m exhaling reality and breathing in my youth beofre it’s stolen by the summer wind.
Characters of me free fall through childhood. Confidently they weave my epic and pause…. before they take their final bow.
“Just lay your head back on the ground, let your hair spill all around me, offer up your best defense.”
For The Moments I Feel Faint
19 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Poems Tags: Difficult moments, Rise Against
Guilt stricken doubt knots in my throat when the days pass with empty dial tones,
And summer breezes take you farther away.
Nature’s climax is stifling in its richness.
Lost inside it, we pause for this invasive nap in other people’s beds.
Trying to squeeze the air, I drop my breath to the floor and lose track of my heartbeat.
There is nothing but dry embers, where I once washed my hands.
Tears wet my pillow instead of your cheek as I take my next dose of loneliness.
I fill your cracks with romantic anecdotes, praying it will be enough for both of us.
As predictable as you are, I surprise myself with how I cannot change a thing.
But you’ll be there in autumn’s shadow, when the earth breathes in and the world stops spinning.
I’ll be chasing days on freeways and mornings watching you sleep.
One day we’ll move slowly on sidewalks and you’ll choose to wake to smiling face,
Which will finally be enough for you.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours first. Let’s compare scars I’ll tell you whose is worse.”
I’m Like… This is Hard
17 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Musings Tags: Adulthood, Mae
I’m a mess I guess. Stuck in between two chapters of the same life. The one I’m making for myself and the one that got me here. It’s been the attempt to bridge this gap that has given me sleepless nights and retching sobs while curled up on the bathroom floor. Let me back up a moment. Most people begin to write to unleash their demons because they have experienced some insane level of torture or a have a incomprehensible battle to overcome. Mine somehow seems less valid or exciting but it is as rampant as the common cold. I look around and cannot find a person who has not been touched in some way direct or inadvertent by the pain of divorce. The dreaded D word. It’s so typical and even more cliché. Oh poor little white girl whining away on some blog about how it’s unfair that daddy and mommy live in separate mansions now. Boo fucking woo. People are dying. Real hate and terror exist in this world and honestly your problems pale in comparison. Well that might all be true and it’s all a matter of perspective. However that is no reason for me not to share mine. In fact it is that very fear of feeling insignificant that has kept me from writing this down. That somehow what I’m feeling has less clout than a mother battling cancer or a child with an incurable disease. I think people tell you that to give you comfort and say “Hey, look it’s not that bad, at least you don’t have these problems” [enter et cetera list here]. So far nothing on that list has made the pain go away. I guess why I am writing is to figure out what comes next.
As an adult child of divorce I face a strange quandary. My parent’s latest fight doesn’t dictate the daily course of my life and the forming of my personality and moral fiber is already complete. “Thank God it happened when you were older” is what I have heard a lot and experienced fighting back the urge to hurl a “Fuck you” right back at the friendly stranger. It may not have as strong as impact on the pattern and routine my life but it does something to you. Something deep and unexplainable. Something that your typical sensitive privileged girl who loves where she came from can’t cope with.
Excuse me for one moment, as I’m re-reading back what I have written so far… first a radio commercial then music pumps through my window from the street below at an obnoxious volume. Some group of people. What assinine pricks think that that is appropriate when I am thinking about going to bed. I go on the deck to investigate and it’s coming from a stretch hummer limo waiting for it’s entourage before embarking on some night far more fabulous than the one that lies in front of me. A twinge of jealousy and a flood of nostalgia hit me for a time that it might have been me jetting off to some perfect night suspended in glitz and carefree of neighbors noise complaints. I have half a mind to scream at them “Turn your shit down!” then all at once it hit me. Inside of three years ago I would have been down there pumping, and if some crotch-hole neighbor bitched us out I would have flipped them off and cranked it with my head out the sunroof as we drove away, not even bothering to spend my time dwelling on a sad life they must actually have.
I’m the one with the pitiful life. It’s not me that’s bothered by the noise, its my circumstance. The fact that I have to get up at 6 am to go in early for the job I don’t like so I can leave early for a dentist appointment that I will have to copay for through my insurance is enough to make any twent pissy. Twent has got to be a word to describe that age post teenager pre adult. Or adult struggling with loss of teenager identity. Fuck. I can’t believe I’m such a huge crab. I stop myself and continue writing and I listen to the music play “When I Come Around” and “The Scientist” before that big black car glides away. I snap back and sit here and ponder what is missing. What do I want to try and get back? What did I do in youth that was so wonderful so deliciously sweet that I can still taste the nectar of indulgence and freedom just beyond my grasp? The reality is we did absolutely nothing and everything. We just killed time waiting for life to start and it was incredible what we filled the space with. Now that life has started there is no stopping it. It’s waiting in line for a ride that makes you sick. You spent all that time in the queue that when you finally get up to the chair you don’t think about it you just get on, not realizing that standing in line might have ben the most fun you will have all day. As the ride starts to get you sick you think to yourself just hold on it will be over soon enough and I can just sit still again. Fat chance dummy, this extreme life roller coaster intends to make you her bitch until you are too feeble and tired to stand. And when it finally lets you off you will have to use the handicapped exit anyway.
This is all quite sad, but mostly true. I am about finding new ways to taste nectar and squeeze juice even though the fruit is not as readily available. It’s a re-working of priorities and a general slowing down process. I’m used to always working toward something, completing a task, finishing a project. Now life is the project and I don’t want to finish any time soon.
“Waiting for the rain to stop. Destination: beautiful. Seems that I’m still waiting for the sun.”
Soon Gone
16 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Songs Tags: Friends, Silly Little Songs
Summertime in a broken sunset, freezed forever in my memory. And the clouds go racing past the velvet colored sky. Oh Father Time did you used to be so evil? Chasing me and my feet are running. Crashing through the surface that’s everything. Come away, come pretend.
Pretend that time will never find us, and we can catch our breath. That we can’t smell the rotting of the fruit we never picked. That the skies won’t cease their raining, unfailingly delaying the future that’s ahead. And pretend that this won’t be the last time we’ll be friends again.
The past is close behind us. Why will he forsake us? Maybe he’ll mistake us if we hide beneath the sheets. I can’t see where I’m going the sun is in my eyes. Wake me up and tell me that all this was a dream, and I can live this life again. This doesn’t have to be goodbye, if we can make him bend.
Let’s pretend that time will never find us, and we can catch our breath. That we can’t smell the rotting of the fruit we never picked. That the skies won’t cease their raining, unfailingly delaying the future that’s ahead. And pretend that this won’t be the last time we’ll be friends again.
Seize the moment, seize the day. Night will soon be coming. As I sit and think I hope that I can bring myself to take a piece of you with me and maybe… We will live this life again. Oh, I cry as summer dies and the sun goes down in my eyes. Go ahead, my friend.
Pretend that time will never find us, and we can catch our breath. That we can’t smell the rotting of the fruit we never picked. That the skies won’t cease their raining, unfailingly delaying the future that’s ahead. And pretend that this won’t be the last time we’ll be friends again.
For my amazing friends, that showed me the world and taught be to know myself.
Between Clothes and Skin
15 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Poems Tags: Desire, Space Between, Tracy Chapman
In that space between
Clothes and skin
Desire boils, blooms
And simmers in its place.
Clothes and skin
Shed like rust
In a chemical bath
When we stand too close.
Shed like rust
Beneath the sand
And stand behind
The crumbling sand castles.
Beneath the sand
You walk halfway
And drive the rest
Running, until empty.
You walk halfway
and run the risk
Before we change our minds
And lose our way among the thicket of lies.
And run the rest
Let the record play
As we pause for breath
In that space between.
“You write the words and make believe, There is truth in the space between; Sometimes a lie, is the best thing.”
Our Years
14 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Musings Tags: Better Than Ezra, Friendship goodbye
There is so much to say and yet the words I am able to craft here will never be quite enough. Plainly put in the most direct way, a friendship has died. It was as pure and important as faith in God. As all-encompassing and soul crushing as first love and as beautiful and brief as a shooting star. This goodbye like so many that I have had to make in the past two years is tearing me to shreds. Mostly because with it I am having to say goodbye to a part of myself that I love. We shaped each other and we became who we would be and sealed where we came from all in one indiscernible loop. We were driftwood when we found each other, lost in the sea of adolescence searching for an identity and somewhere to belong. We sanded ourselves the same way and we built a fortress with each other and soon these three pieces of driftwood were pillars in the sand. Marking our places on the shore firmly and proudly, our eyes set west toward the brink of the future. I am suffering a heartbreak to look back at my teen years that were woven from hope and drunk on possibility and that were so sure of themselves. Those years knew what the world said about time like them, that they would be outrun and forced to grow up. But our years new better, our years were invincible and we would never end. Those adults were fools that lost sight of who they were when they were closer to being themselves then any other time. Those people that let the relationships that shaped them dwindle and fade like a fire after dawn. Those idiots didn’t have what we had. We knew it then that something between us was special. We thought about getting a matching tattoo to notarize it. But then how can you sum up what it was that we had in one image or word? We didn’t need it and we never could decide. I think I stayed true to that intention as best as a wooden post can stay unaffected by the incoming tide. I’ve sustained some gashes and graffiti and I’m a little warped beneath the surface but I am still more or less in the same place. That post that planted itself beside me that Thanksgiving break all those low tides ago was made of something different. Not so deeply rooted in what I thought was an eternal beach deep, she uprooted, traveled away, was stripped and refinished and made into a mast of a shiner ship that sails by me sometimes but never stops to get out and stand with me facing outward looking at the horizon for all the worlds beauty and promise. It wasn’t just the two of us there. There was a third stake in the sand yet again made of something entirely different. She is standing facing outward like me boasting her own with splinters and bird droppings and other things. She still is in view though a little ways down the beach now and tonight as the sun set we saw the fancy ship sail out of sight for what might be the last time. We watched it for awhile even though in the ship’s silhouette we could no longer distinguish our friend from it’s mast and sails. It is an entirely new thing she has become. What can you do as a post in the sand? Not much but feel the water rushing in and out rooting you deeper to the place that you have come to be and hope that your friend is happy. I find myself wondering if now I wish we had gotten that tattoo. At first thought it seems like a good avoidance of a sure regret, but I don’t know. Under all of life’s scars and markings I think it would feel good to know that it is there.
“We were standing on the hood of your car, singing out loud when the sun came up.”
