WordSpill

I awoke into a mist, and scattered light

On the walls and through windows

Not exposing my head

that was lost in the night.

As dawn, outstretching, comes for my mistakes

But the dawn’s unforgiving,

and some mistakes it wont take.

And no memories within me

Of following you down

But guilt lies in the cracks you cant see

the ones not on the ground.

Seeping up in the storms that are cast from up high,

The lowly thoughts, regrets, and lies.

Now the sun’s faceless stare beats down on the streets

Living in the day, at least light fills what is empty.

Puddles shine out, reflecting horrors back at the weak

The puddles, and my shadows veer away from my feet

Melting off and away, waiting for the undoing of what’s done,

My diaphanous self looms and leers, paralyzed by the sun

I’ll be waiting so long, might as well disappear

It happens to everyone

Why not now, why not here?

And I was meant to be down here

And you were meant to bring us down

And I guess I followed, with a gently pull at my will

slipped on some empty perfect moment that left me spinning

Spinning, and reeling, and lost, completely unstilled

Asking every now and again…

“did I lose something that morning?”

“did it even belong to anyone, or need to be?”

“or, was I freed of it?”

“was that thing just me?”

Please promise I cant come back,

I don’t want to be returned.

Because I followed you down,

I followed you down.

I followed you down.

Carrying,

blacked out,

night’s message,

Some days we hold our breaths

Some days we gasp for breath

These masks wont protect us from the times

Or this breathless state of disbelief

Some days I wish I were in that tin can

far above the world

But down here in the vacuumous reality

The space that exists lies between you and me

I wish I felt as though this were like drowning

As if there were a surface

And if I could just learn to swim

I could claw my way up, I could get above it,

breathe easy...

But actually airlessness is all around

And our oxygen is limited

And I cant help but wonder for how long

Was I wasting air before I started losing my breath

But now, I laugh over the neighbor attempting, unsuccessfully, to learn to play trombone

Successfully losing air to noise.

And I am happy to lose that breath

A glimpse. A fading light. A flickering texture and shape that expands your mind just past the end of the earth not quite into the universe. 

A bountiful emergence, uninheritable and unteachable, reaches past and is a reminder that you are not here. 

You stare up, you stare down, and the magnificence in either space withholds all the wisdom and you just hold an emptiness available to endlessly be filled.

I hope someday I do. I hope someday I am...

Convince you?

Some days I imagine it as a worthless task.

Capable of guiding you into the expansive unknowing. As honey drips or avalanches down the pot and an open dawn’s light creeps down the cliff face.

The emptiness available to endlessly be filled. With hume, and dust, and descendants of death.

Back in Time, like an eclipse of your mind and mine. Asynchronous to synchronous for a glimpse. In December of some year, although I cant remember, the fear is that I will forget.

The water under ice feigns being stuck, but as it escapes, its place it is taken by the same river. And the ice is the slowest and heaviest feelings of the river. The ice is quiet and the voice of it doesn’t carry the same in the flow.

I hold onto a cupped hand of the river and shake under its icy collisions. It fights my grasp like an animal held for too long or too close. Why am I fighting gravity and the river? My resistance only weakens both of us. Something ends here, something is always ending, always beginning, never still - the river flows.

Your lighter doesn't open the way it usually does and after trying three times you approach it differently.

A rescue mission in the tangled corpuscles of my memories?

Oh no.

No, I would have left them alone,

alone gasping and scared in a descending pit

I wish they could leave me alone.

They come back on their own accord though.

The way some people's ears hear the pariah on the street with the quiet flute.

Over the voices, breaching through the manhole steam.

Discarded details driving the despondent deeper into discomfort

Buttery rays of light;

god? the apocalypse that never happened?

They've already haunted, I hope this is it.

I wish it were the apocalypse.

2003.. or maybe 2002

Safety features in cars like explosive airbags and automatically locking doors, that produced the feeling of a cage, were more prevalent than DVD monitors and AUX inputs in this beginning of our technologically inexperienced millennium. I remember the "click, click, click..." accompanying the seat belt as you let it coil back after stretching it to its furthest reaches. After it tightened around your torso, it would not let you move even an inch forward. Therefore, you crash, are flung forward, but once you come back to your seat again you wont get tossed around too much more. I heard this stubborn, obsessive clicking two days ago, in 2012. A landlocked seasickness took hold.

*You and I had gone alone, Dad was surfing this weekend, like every weekend back then. I enjoyed humoring the older couples by committing juvenile acts of stand up, you drank a lot of wine along with everyone else who was old enough. I noticed your consumption. You did not.

A few miles after our departure, I observed you swerving and dreading the many miles to go, I tugged, tugged, tugged with one hand very quietly at the no stretch belt and held the outstretched almost-safety in my other hand.

"Click"

"I must be quiet, I don't want her to be offended"

"Click click"

"She's speeding now"

Every click and an inch of seat belt was stolen from my hands and sent back behind the plastic close to my window.

"click, click"

"would she even notice this stupid clicking if she is that gone?"

"click"

"she looked over at me"

"click"

"i wish i could tell her to do this too"

I remember that I would gauge the amount of swerving on her ability to keep the car parallel to the solid white line on the passenger side.

"CLICK"

Little belt remains, and relief grows as the fabric in my hands wanes.

"click click"

It is finished

We knocked over a mailbox before getting home. You blamed it on not being able to see at night. I said nothing and then I obviously forced myself to forget, seeing that my paranoia was unnecessary. It is not important and I wish it had remained submerged. Since it did not I will choose to record it.

How do geometric shifts align with cataclysmic grace?

How do atoms accept the forces?

How does love fade away?

It’s always in a dreamy light that I see your smile, laugh, and gaze.

I look beyond the child that lost, at first, and then he gained.

I believe in you without a doubt, in any path you choose to take. Your river has a lot of room and places left for you to play.

I dreamed we lived near the tops of the trees.

Our lives curled in smoke, and fog, and misty pines.

Where holes burst open to skies that felt lighter.

For trees that climb, there is never really a top.

The raven kraa coincides with windblown cotton endlessly colliding with your body.

Lichen grows on the leafless branches, like splashes of life on stark shadows.

And light through panes of glass would blanket the rooms in lazy warmth.

I am watching you walk away imagining what turning thought is guiding you forward in my dream.

The curtains dance in the dream and whip around to greet you, but you turn.

If only I could remember dreams like they were life... they are life, on the other side of The Spin.

Your dark edges fade into the night’s sway as the candle at your feet shows your heart, and eyes, and gentle smile in movement.

Wisdom has seeped in through your pores as poetry wept from mine, but all the same, you smile.

“When you knew clarity” - that is how you refer to it now.

I’m drunk on your Spin, frustrated at its speed, frustrated against its agility.

Time slows down as everything around you spins faster, and you fall behind as you falter to catch up.

Grasping in the dark feels heaviest when you are crawling forward.

Your shape vibrates against air and you reflect what doesn’t touch you and isn’t you.

I wish to Spin softly, unsuspectingly closest to the earth.

I’m a tourist here

I move from town to town on wheels as I watch Too Hot ladies move from room to room on worn shoes

“I’ve eaten well,” I tell my mom on the phone, others don’t look like they’ve eaten in weeks.

I sleep in a motel tonight and a van tomorrow, but the woman in the parking lot has been in her van with her 3 children for the last several days and is Eastering as I wave goodbye.

I’ve paid more for showers in the past three weeks than I will in the next three months, every day my goal is a shower, if I don’t get one I still don’t have enough dirt on me to cover up how privileged I am.

My friends have always said that “I was born into good credit”, I’d like to think I worked hard to make it exceptional, but it’s true I was born into this.

I have an income, I have good rental references, I have a house in another state that I am selling for more than I ever dreamed.

Pay to ride

Pay to pick

Pay to dump

Pay to get off

Pay for quiet

Pay for noise

Pay to be healthy

Pay more to be sick

Pay to be Be breathless, Broken, on a beeping machine

Pay to die

Oh, the ungodly growth!

The mold, and plants, the trees,

and me.

All free to grow, reaching tendrils into the nooks and through borders that regulations and laws thought they could keep us out of .

Thank you for letting me grow free

A beached whale of a heart;

Decorated in seaweed,

Clad in olivine and chestnut chain metal.

Misguided,

It landed on shore.

It hears the last lappings of the tiny waves nearby

Loudly laughing lappings.

The whips of weeds lash into armor,

Liquid obsidian streams trickle through barnacle ranges,

Final moans of a lamenting song leak from its openings.

Adhishree was the name of the elephant that carried me through the lilies and to his side on our wedding day.

Embossed in gold and merlot, her trunk had been painted a flurry of pastel colors and she was illuminated beside me.

That was twelve years ago, we remain next to each other, seemingly indifferent to each other.

His white hair has been tied back since I was introduced to him. He has never shaved but his tea-stained whiskers never grow.He is wrinkly and emits a stench when he does not shower. I have to ask him to cast himself into something else when love makes us hungry for flesh; an old man turns into the delicious hard ginger candies I sucked on before meeting him. He is pleased when I am pleased.

“The neighbors want you to wear something other than your robe when you get the paper,” I state blandly after hanging up the phone.

“Oooohhhh they’ll get it, you sputter, the words accompanied out of your mouth with your tea.

He was never very skilled. His practicing caused me to become a mirror. He looked inside me and saw himself. He knew me, he loved me, he turned me back into this woman.

We don’t grow old. We don’t change.

He conjures a bed of flowers, a burning log, a small death. He conjured me once.

I’m thinking of a man. An old family friend. He lived by the bay and fished in its inky waters. A paraplegic, he made things that should be hard seem easy. I sat on his lap as he wheeled me around the landing. His trailer was alive with cats; they’d move, and jump, and slink. You would hear them like the creaking of breathing walls. He’d share with me the lures he used while fishing; the rubbery squid that became iridescent and glittered under water. They were homed in a shed under his trailer, a space too scary for me to enter, but he shimmied himself down and reemerged from the dark with the treasured lures.

I’m thinking of a frog. One that would often climb into the hot tub and stay under the lid; warm and wet in the winter. And when you took off the lid to get in, there was a frog, a surprise, a treasure.

I’m thinking of a rafting trip in Oregon when I was very young. As we went along in calmer water, the sun on ripples would cast reflective, eely shapes of light on the river bed. An older sister would tease and say they were snakes and if I touched the bottom they would bite me. All I wanted was to be in water.

What then? What am I supposed to do with these memories, and the metaphors I’ve made to connect them to how I am feeling? Why would my brain create such a puzzle? Wouldn’t you imagine as a soul controller and the root of all my feelings and desires it would err towards happiness and calm at all means necessary? There is good and evil in every cell that connects me to myself. Why am I still fighting in the dark? Why am I abandoned to fight internally eternally? Is this the only way to make heaven real or better than the corporeal? I will make this eternally mine. Would you live it again? Absolutely, over and over.

I am thinking of Becca. What happened? Where has she gone and to what dark place did she emerge? Where is that place, is it a hole that is scary but holds treasure that glitters in the deep, beneath the water? Our holes – it’s not about what we are missing, but the darkness we turn around and Spin to gold.

I am Spinning upside down into gold as the candlelight flickers past my eye lids and activates the cones and rods that hold a place in my brain for you.

Guilded webs, sparkle in the morning and through the austere, leafless branches I catch a glimpse of the honey that touched the height of the sky and falls each night. What a fortunate fall, as milky light brings back the web weaver to perfectly cast what art she can string together. What she has Spun is left to be seen only as she sleeps in the light. An over-correction at each thatched end.

The sea is still in my lungs. I try to cough it out but it is salty at each release. Maybe I need to swim in fresher waters. Who could say if that was safer?  I sleep in the tumbling embrace of a waterfall, and through the invisible bruises from falling water, I am washed with newness. Fuller transience and a sloppy life eventually lived in perfection, as I realize this is what I have. How do I tumble further and maybe softer, live beneath my breaths. Quieter, loftier, and with intent. A gentle breeze heaves and extends the room, and I shrink. Maybe Spinning upside down is falling into falling water, escaping what feels the same in the air and the space between the sky. Living in transience but slower.

Eddies of brilliant light flashed from leaf-litter and a diaphanous coat of the liquid-air interface. The perfect cast and the slip of the line underneath. The web, slipping under with effortless grace, glittered with bubbles, forever in water.

Eternally living this - it isn’t an answer to the questions that plague us, but a philosophy and a way to experience life. This life, as if you would live it over and over. To appreciate the suffering and joy as necessary on the path of what is. And if you collapse the aspect of time in your life into a single point, that is all you are. Orbiting and recurring, as seen in nature; in the day and the night, the repetition of seasons, the dream and wake state.

You Spin into your dream, awake. Time is meaningless and edges don’t exist - this is a part of that collapsed time, this is all of that collapsed time. This is the negative side some might say, but really, it is just the other side of The Spin. And if you can catch control of The Spin, meditate on nothing but Spinning and when the Spinning stops. And then, almost immediately, you are caught in the dream.

I am looking up from the dark behind me at the reflective ripples on the surface. I am falling and feeling quiet and heavy. A hand reaches out and I am lifted into cold air and shards of ice.

Did you notice who was under? What lurked or loved from beneath? And how the mumbled sentences under water are like talking into an empty bottle and hearing only the attempt at words.

You build up the courage to grab one of the luminous eels only to realize that the sand and rocks that you were able to surface want to fall away and give themselves to gravity. It all falls away and you are left with you - each side of you in The Spin. Let yourself get used to the side of you that you hate only because you aren’t used to looking at it. Familiarity is comfort not love, and I am being pushed away - or are we pushing each other away? Each side of The Spin, pushing the other?

I sit in my ethics class and cringe at how my colleagues in research are stingily deciding who deserves authorship. It feels capitalistic, and they seem bothered that any amount of recognition should trickle down. “Does having more authors on a paper devalue the work,” I ask. “Yes, it dilutes it,” is someone’s answer. What about someone who contributes intellectual direction – no! A technician who is hired to do a job and if they do it with the speed and efficiency that only an expert can boast, but you deem unworthy – “no!” I am really hoping that is just how some of them feel though. It’s so weird to think how people equate the value of their science to authorships and a few pieces of paper (more recently some pixels on a screen). I hate this system… the longer I’m on this earth, the more I find out that I hate so many systems besides the ones I learned about in my hard science lectures. I want so badly for science to be for the sake of science… was it ever that way? This is why we are all in therapy – months, years, decades of 60 hour weeks and lost sleep reduced down to an impact factor for a couple of pages. No amount of authors could ever erase any second of work that someone did to answer a question that they truly thought was worth it.  However, somehow we can envision it being diluted and we sit debating who deserves to have a name, because until you get that authorship, you don’t really exist to these people.

I have sat there and watched everyone around me do experiments, and read papers, and analyze data competently. While I ordered supplies, or made reagents, or cleaned rooms and fridges and freezers to standards that might help make others’ experiments go smoothly. I called maintenance, I worked on training regimens, wrote SOPs and safety plans, inventoried, moved decades worth of undone experiments from failing freezers as my hands were burned with -80°C ice and metal. I loved it though, even as I watched all the things around me move forward, as each needy interruption kept me staying still.

And my worth and how I could never consider myself a scientist during this time was largely based on this notion built on a foundation where I was being invested in monetarily, not intellectually. Truly though, I was a lucky one with one of the most encouraging bosses that I think may exist in this field now. She made sure that I had tastes of projects that I could take ownership of and develop my palate with. Most of the morsels didn’t take, but when I sunk my teeth into a project that actually ended up consuming me, everything changed. I couldn’t just watch and support as everything and everyone moved forward without me.  But that blissful fulfillment of being relied on doesn’t follow you forward sometimes.

I am “moving forward” now, but I look back and miss that useful feeling; it felt selfless and rewarding the way I remember it now. I look back at the times I cried in storage rooms because some privileged fool belittled my expertise or acted as though I owed them anything. I understand completely how my new lab’s manager feels when she says she wants to do science but is stuck in administrative hell… there has to be license plate holder for that. I hate taking projects away from her because she has no time or freedom to explore these compelling questions at the bench. Now I am the interrupter and resource user, I learn and read and analyze too now. If this is the struggle that they lord over those at the bottom, I am not impressed.

Tube, pipet,

broth and flame

Hold them all together

Let them all fall away

A single Cell

Of course You fell

Straight into the vessel I left barely unshelled

One step forward, one step back

This dance and your existence

Expose what I lack

And like invisible ink with a slow release

As you sink ever deeper,

You leech, and expand, and do as you please

Quelle malicieuse, cette petite

Step on my feet

Destroy my experiments

but at least dance for me

For here in this laser limelight

You make your debut

And the collection of cells in me

sees the pure grace in you

And while the liminal stage

can’t yet be bridged or erased

I feel less alone in the transmitted glow’s embrace

And the coverslip between us stares lovingly back

As the catoptric glass obliquely reflects my face