Open letter...

I just re-read our
few old letters
for the first time in ages,
and witnessed
what false hope
I have been standing in
With regard to you...

You never promised me
Anything, but I
Took your existence to heart
And hung it like a lamplight
to guide my way...it was
Mere fantasy, yet
I ran down the driveway each night,
To the mailbox, and
Died a little bit each time
Your letter
Didn't come...

You never offered your love to me...
Just a place to rest my
Travelled bones, while I journeyed beyond
The boundaries of the life I'd known
And headed blindly west... You
Just listened to me sincerely
With genuine absence of agenda
And it was I who chose
To toe the line...

Any interest in me was
Feeting at most...
Tainted by the lighting,
By the sensation of cheap red wine...
The kind that stains unsuspecting tongues
And teeth. Your sincerity soothed me.
I wept, and you scribed a poem about
The glisten of my tears in darkness...
The loneliness of a long hard season
Seduced you a little bit... and then I did...
It was just a kiss...
It was just lying side by side,
Close but not touching, yet
You presence riveted my very core...

If only you would have stopped me that night...
Walked away, or sent me outside with a tent...
Indeed, I might have shattered there
Like a smashed plate upon white brick...
I would have gone then, back to
The lover I wanted to leave, and the lies
I was living out...
But it would have been clear to me then
That I would have to learn to do without you...
And I would not have spent the past two years
Loveless, waiting for some nonexistent thing
That happened perhaps once, in my memory
Of that single night...

Sudsy Elbows and Tear Stained Cheeks

i feel it like a sickness
how this love is killing me
i'd walk into the fingers
of your fire willingly
and dance the edge of sanity
i've never been this close
i'm in love with your ghost
unknowing captor
you never know how much you
pierce my spirit
but i can't touch you
can you hear it
a cry to be free
oh i'm forever under lock and key
as you pass through me
-Indigo Girls, Ghost

The farmer's story

It's hard to say what came first... there was the church, the garbage. But then there was the coast long before that...and Davenport. There was Ben. There was needing someone because I was so alone in this new place. There was the ocean. The mountains. Colorado. Virginia. Eighth grade.

The truth is...it was just the other week. I was sitting on a tree when it came to me. I was curled up sort of, about four feet off the ground, reading this book about fairies and how they're nature's angels. That is a detail that stands alone. It was a healing time for me...this was my little retreat...this tree, behind the tiny yellow coastal church, whose doors were always locked.

Wait, wait...I need to back up. Several days before it came to me, I quit my job. I'd been working for a violent father who does not recycle because he doesn't like the look of the extra bins in his kitchen. After two month's putting up with this man's wastefulness and general disregard, I needed fresh air to detoxify my entire being. For some reason, I came to Davenport and for some reason, I decided to clean up all of the garbage on the ground around this tree behind the church. This compulsion had come over me recently...to literally, by hand, clean up garbage in all of nature's spaces that I cross.

I have heard of people picking up pennies compulsively. I've heard of a woman who has to pick up a pen everytime she sees one on the ground and whenever she does it, something good happens to her. It seems that my job is to pick up garbage. Inevitably, the spaces reward me. The Davenport tree is located next to a resource center that assists migrant farmers and others in poverty on the Northern Central Coast of California. I found my way there, and now volunteer in exchange for food and internet access.

Keep asking...keep giving...and you shall receive. That is my recent lesson.

I lay back on this great branch and closed my eyes, and they turned to shadowy oak leaves on my peaceful face. One cold stone corridor led the way to my innermost heart and I found this hut there, this tiny living hut inside my heart with a warm stove burning and candlelight inside. I had always before that thought it was solid. But I asked my heart on this day-after reading and meditating at length- what it wanted. And despite that all of this seemed strange to me, the hut's door opened a crack in response to my gentle knock. The tiny window illuminated and I could see a couple in there, like little gnomes, living a quiet rural life. I knew at that moment that I had to become a farmer...

When you find yourself in a moment like this...a ripe, raw moment...you put yourself on alert, and observe the syncronicities abounding around you...

I have become aware that my Soul is a great deal more than what this present Self experiences. I have existed for ages and more. One glimpse of my Soul is a flowing green field. Perhaps that's Ireland in me, I am not sure...but I have seen it.

Miracles happen....

Christmas

However hard I try to shake this fantasy
I still can't cease to see familiar details--
The light on your glasses, the curls
On your gently weathered forehead,
Your whisper voice against my damp
Earlobe. Corduroy imprints on skin.
I beg at morning break and fall of night
For some Spirit to carry the illusion of Love
From me--this satchel of impossible dreams--
Out with the compost, into rich red Mother Earth.
Yet by noon's light, my compulsive daily fingers
Drag a stick in dreamers sand and carve
Your name there, on the beach,
Far enough as to never see
The ocean swallow up my wish...

Solstice: Total Surrender

If I am to trust in faith and reach in blindness
Behind a sky blue velvet curtain
Into uncertainty's volatile future...
Must I first cease to guess what's on the other side? Must I
Dissociate the name of Love from the face
That I've experienced as Love's embodiment?
Must I cease to hope, or continue with mere infant's grasp
Of what Hope might mean...
Despite my previous devotion
To one particular connotation...the idea
That he and I one day might
Divinely reunite?
Do I have to stop dreaming of him
Despite that it's because of him
That I dare at all
To dream?

Retchid Unique

What dangers
Does she dare
To dance with
Unwittingly, by
Choosing to
Chase visions
With permanence
A fraction that of
Lightning?

What blindness
Has she, to look that way,
With guiltless ease,
Past mounting debt
Into a rolling hill future
With not a penny
To her name
And gold carats
Against it?

What right has she
To heed the call
Of some strangest voice,
Whispering silent words
Upon still winds...
The breath of
Strongest
Madrones trees?

What gall! That she dare
Growl back at a mountain lion,
Dance in sacred circle
Fairy forests? Sitting, thinking
While others work
And offer
To pay
Her rent?

What life is this
But that of a dreamer?
What wonder that
Her people
Burned
In Salem; her
grandmama
Çhoked
In an Asylum?

Alas--she worries not
And waits for
Unicorns
To carry her, skirts flowing,
Along her shimmer cloud
Carpet way

Confession

I dreamed of him so vividly last night
In full color. He had come to these
Green mountain foothills, where gulls and
Sea-lions echo every day, and I saw him
Through disbelief, standing
On the street, just outside my
Car window. My inevitable smile
And childlike instincts demanded I run to him,
But my roommate said I need to wait--
To let him come to me. "Don't you see?"
I asked her. "He already has!"

The violet sky
Was silent and still. Time passed in the dream.
It was all that I could think about,
While my body worked and lived--to return
To him. But I learned through gossip
That he had moved here with a girlfriend
Of two years, and the news that they had
Recently split came to late to spare
My severed heart.
Alas--
The pain felt sacred; my toxic blood was
Clear and crystalline. Other porcelain doll girls
Tried to explain that he was too this, too that...
The girlfriend leaving him was proof
That he was there for the leaving
And nothing more. But I was stone strong
In my feelings. It was too late for me.
My heart belonged to him already
And although I never wished to hold
His unique, transient spirit still
When it longed to move and dance...
The love had been always, and true, and real
And so I went to him,
In this dream, and began the process
Of manifesting this love in the most ordinary way...
Through mere and magical acquaintanceship...

Indeed...this love is real and true today
In the safe vault of my deepest heart.
There is no sadness in it--
No longing. Just faith in the belief
That our paths will cross again--
And though I dare not hold my breath,
I patiently await that golden moment--
Which, if it lasts only a moment, will
Nonetheless bring me to rejoice...

Outlook...

Where does imagination end and reality begin?
What delicate balance must one maintain
Between Mindfulness and the human body?
What is this place that holiest spirits walk
Barefoot through fields of broken glass, that
Angels cough the burning exhaust atmosphere
Into aching opalescent lungs...What is this species,
Man, for whom the forest fairies sacrifice their lands,
For whom the animal kingdom concedes to most grotesque
Lifestyles, and wide genocide death? Who are they
And what would they do with their most incredible,
Most illusive, most misunderstood pure super powers
Were they to realize the fertility that each and all possess?