Writer. Artist. Cosmetologist.

I am the prodigal son

I won’t come home

But I’m not on the run

Smoke, wind and sand

What’s done is done

You can never go home

When you hold a warm gun

Self-aggrandizement game gone wrong

It’s lost all of it’s fun

As the jail bars cast a longer shadow

Towards this prodigal one

You can’t make bricks from this loam

Ammo gone dry, this clip’s got none

No place to go

See how they run

Raise my hand at the temple

I am the prodigal son

Even with high walls around me

It couldn’t block out the sun

That stung in my eyes

I never meant to hurt anyone

Victim to a strange level of indifference

That’s not to be outdone

Deny the chaplain like Judas

I am the prodigal son

In an atomic flash the cathedral that I have erected

Will be reduced to ash and pyre

Coordinated combustion with violence and indifference

The pulpits will be made concave and implode

The lectern will be scrubbed from existence

The domes will sag and crumble

Staunch white light will purify each narrow corridor

Where letters were stored tight in between wooden planks

Each priceless piece and thing that might flee those narrow halls

Will bubble and evaporate into a residue of grease with the others

The resident vermin will follow the draft from stone burrows to earth

Tasked with nesting in a new unsuspecting patch

As the church is raised, and the foundation caves into the land

There will be only one artefact that remains

The piece I left with you

But I still worry

They say there was a weirdness in the night

Some creature came up caterwauling

No one dared to look through their windows

When that orb hung in the air on a lone stage

No audience, just a forest of buildings

That cry going up in the dark, through the train

Who abandoned who?

Foregone applause on the seventh hour

To that symphony of death

No sirens call now

Just that yowling coming up

Out’ve the dryer vents, percolators

Rolled up into one thick smog like a soup

That made you hold your breath

Narrow the eye

Hand at the level of your mouth

Wondering what to do when a wage is the war

Words like intubation yodel through the mind

Before that wretched grating cry comes up

Past a hollow face on a glowing screen

Behind a veil of plastic, cloth and tape

Cut short by a cord down the throat

Who abandoned who?

The hands of the hearst drivers are full

The grave diggers mits are heavy with spade

The politician leers at a dollar and shaves it down

To place coins on the eyes of their constituents

Their fingers curl, palms close up one last time - empty

Under the buzz of florescent lights

If you pray to the gods of wealth, fame and plenty

If you lay your lips upon that alabaster stone

You must lay down your heart as a point of entry

Possess already within you the will to obtain and to own

If you seek all that is faceted and shimmers

If your fingers long to touch what so few obtain

Then you must reach out your hand to the mirror

And believe all your dragons already to be slain

The gods of all that are golden and heavy

Listen for each copper to ring out loud and true

If you plead on behalf of fear or long with envy

Then the maw of money will open to devour you

So bend upon your knees with the greatest of caution

Spread and cup your hands with slow and tremulous heed

For in the end we will all face our rest in the coffin

And no coin has ever held, weighted or extended the deed

I am learning to be kind to myself

To clean my glasses

When they’re frosty with fingertips

So that I can see

Little sweet things that a lover

Might do delicately

Without fanfare

I do for myself, whispering

Affectionate nothings

Into the shadowed parts

of my mind

I clean away the self-doubt

And there's nothing from you

My heart drops

To my horror

I think I had started to like you

Just a little bit

There we were

a green bud of potential

That dropped to the ground

like an acorn

Never getting to unfurl or root

It's nature

There's no one to blame

Perhaps anyway that potential

Was mostly a figment

Of razor sharp what might have beens

But oh how I would have liked

To see that blossom bloom

Radiant and swaying

Open petals facing the sun

Instead of a grounded thing

Waiting to go to seed

Or find itself foraged

Filling stomachs more eager

To nest and persevere

Missed opportunities

Mantras of oh well

Perhaps a tree is needed

Touch your pain

Feel the lightening in your pulse

Embrace it's necessity

You can cover it in a blister of anger

But the water and blood beneath will still build

The pain has to have somewhere to go

And no amount of containing pain

Will purge it

Your pain belongs to you with all the autonomy

Of bodily fluids that manifest from each gland

Own your pain as you own your body

Root the cause, treat it and mend

Learn to look at and care for your soul

As you do for your skin, mind and guts

Doctor your pain without self judgement

Or suffer, but your suffering too

No matter the cause

Will belong to the one who bares the contagion

Touch your pain

I am the product of capitalistic breeding

Before a cruel agony grips my throat

It wretches me out of the production line

I am rattled like a doll, suspended in a fist

Bruised, fleeting, gasping - but free

For the moment

I walk down water and leaf slick streets

I don’t see my surroundings in suburbia, no

My environment is a gaseous cloud of suggestion

While I ponder over what electricity and juices

Course through and convince me 

That I must love the chaos of it all

Even if I can’t love you

Even if sometimes I don’t love myself

There is no use attaching stigma or resisting

The unrelenting madness that is

Yearning for safety in an unsafe world

Bring me to my knees if you must

I’m ready, I’ve done this before

In perpetuity

After all

The penetrating terror of adrenaline

Awakened me from an anesthetized life

Once chored with redundant normality

Doped up on illusions of security

Now groped roughly from the pool I feel sick

Thank you for that

My now feverish soul has begun to burn uncaged

With an intensity far beyond the kindling of me

I fear it might incinerate everything I have left

But no, I tell the terror smugly

We are not there yet

Not today, I say gently

Is that a chemical cocktail

Running down my throat

Bringing me under and to

Where did you find me?

How did you emerge from the ether?

One moment you aren’t introduced

And the next you come into being

With a show of teeth and an embrace

Then I’m choking on your fingers

My body an arched bridge between us

A structure over a sea of blankets

Bone scaffolding and flesh streets

Spine cracked like a glow stick

In the darkness something whines

The encroaching silence nudged away

We tear our clothes in grief

We tear our clothes in fits of lust

The draught burns, sweet and foul

Flowers and silk tucked into a coffin

My eyes moisten, my tongue whets

My teeth liquefy, shutter and ripple

Where the hell did you come from?

How did you find me?

Damned, accosted, back shrouded

How dare you rip this cloak away

Letting me hear my own shell crack

Before you burrow through and in

Flooding me with who you are

Making a meal out of my insides

Using my rib cage and femur

As platter and utensil

Rubbing your scent into my skin

How dare you awaken this yearning

And in doing so dig my new fate

I don’t know if I can love you

Even if I want to

Even if I do

I can’t

Tapered cloth

Hedged limbs

And an us

Cuttings of leaves

Sitting in a water glass

Prismatic sunlight

But there are no roots

In that simple beauty

Fledgling growth

A womb of water

Suspended in glass

And light

I don’t know if I can grow to

Even if I want to

Even if I am

I can’t

Keep me unpotted

Leave me in the water

Attach me again

Keep me off the shelf

Appendages stretching

A bit about myself, I have lived in Minneapolis for over three years.  The riots are taking place in my neighborhood, as did George Floyd’s murder.

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Like many others I am on edge tonight watching the events across Minneapolis and St. Paul unfold. However, regardless of the tension I feel there is also an overwhelming sense of catharsis and pride. In many ways it's a relief to see people rising up and finally doing something. It fills me with hope. The government has proven time and time again that it doesn’t listen to people’s complaints on social media. The government entity does not hear when people wave signs, walk through streets and then go home in a day. This nation with its ever flashpan level attention span will consume itself, moving onto the next outrage in a blink of an eye, in a day, in an hour.

I can’t help but smile as I see people of color, youths of this nation, people of many backgrounds marching beside one another. They are celebrating in the streets, the streets that their tax dollars pay for. There is a playful, childlike joy in watching them dismantle buildings, remove pieces off of structures, build bonfires under traffic lights, dance, cheer and drink their spoils. There is something beautiful about watching fireworks erupt in the sky over a burning precinct that housed these murderers.

Property is replaceable, lives are not. And the only ones destroying lives are the police this group is attempting to hold accountable for blatant murder. Without due process, without fair incarceration, America is nothing less than tyrannical.

I marched on day one from the place of George Floyd’s murder to the Third Precinct. The only fear I felt was towards the officers. The feeling on the ground among these heroic voices is one of unity, sanctity and companionship. People are dowsing strangers' eyes with milk when the tear gas hits them. I’ve seen them carry those injured and convulsing away who were shot by canisters or rubber bullets. They are embracing, rapping, calling out warnings to one another.

We live in a nation that does not think we are entitled to our own lives, to our own health or the care of it. Black people are systematically oppressed and disproportionately targeted time and time again. Capitalistic entities tilt our elections and our so-called representatives in their favor. They are the greatest polluters of our world and in many ways the greatest oppressors. I do not mourn their brief financial inconvenience at the hand of those truly traumatized and in grief.

These are the American people. This is the composition of this nation. Not one percent of the population who have gorged themselves on enterprise and hoarded the wealth from their hands. Not the CEOs of them which are consistently white men.

This IS America. Outnumbered, out financed, out gunned but finally saying we will be treated as human beings or we will burn an infrastructure that has cultivated our demise to the ground. We will not go silently into that good night. We will no longer bow to bureaucracy. Until black lives matter, no lives matter. These are what modern day patriots look like.

I miss being in love

I hold a charcoal lump in my palm

Roll it around there

My nostrils take in the essence

Of smoke and fragrance of burning

This already cooked incense

I guess you could say

That it’s gone cold

Or I guess you could say

That it’s just in its default state

What was once wood becomes coal

And charcoal becomes ash

How lovely it would be to burn

And transmutate

Once then twice and die out

Licked by flames

Consumed by heat

Glowing orange, gold and blue

From the core of a black heart

An immobile lump

To livid colors of lashing air

Born from heat

And relinquishing to earth

What came from it

Honestly more than anything

I want to be alone

I want to pick up a pen

And for that pen

To be the one that works

Instead of the one I keep putting back

Into my bag, instead of throwing it away

Even though it’s run dry

Like a crow collecting shiny objects

Without meaning

The clutter, the movement

It’s something my trauma can not abide

I need you to be still

I need you to let me take up space

I need you to be accountable

I need you to be accommodating

And I need me to breath, to regrow

Like a plant that needs you to stop watering it

When the roots begin to drown

And for you to water it a little

When the leaves begin to droop

I am yearning for better drainage

And more sunshine

Mouth-less screams

And my tilted faces

Twisting this way and that

Sometimes I’m more audible

And sometimes my exhaustion, the symptom

Is what speaks

I honestly want to be alone more than anything

A social creature

Convinced it is solitary

By lacerations

As unseen

As the feelings are

Author’s Note:  In November of 2019 I went to live off grid and work on an organic farm outside of Austin, Texas for a month.  I stayed in a camper from 1973 I renovated and wrote small memoir blurbs.  This is one of the most poignant.

MEMOIR  POST 2 - THE DEAD HEN

“They’re dead,” I announced sagely.  "Everything and everyone dies.“  It was a finite statement made desperately upon a patch of sandy earth in southeast Texas.  I loosed a guttural, "Huuuugh!”  Into the sky, literally hanging my head back for additional dramatic effect.  For a moment, I was vaguely self-conscious about this display but no one was around other than the chickens at my feet, clucking and strutting.  One chicken crowed and stomped a single foot.  It flapped it’s wings as though acknowledging the death of the grey hen crumpled at our feet.  I stared at the odd ritual, then back to the corpse.

I understood both then and now that this level of gravitas is likely not befitting the life of a nameless hen. She is just, “chicken.”  But I have no direct experience with dead things, or escorting them to their final resting places.  When I was young I had a small dwarf hamster named Tutter that had died.  My dad had gently carried him into the computer room, cradled in a large, callous palm, and offered kindly, “Do you want to see him?”

“Nooooo!”  I howled, and ran out of the room.  Death is natural, but there was something terribly unnatural about it to me.  I wish I could say that uncanny feeling vacated with age and maturity but it didn’t exactly.  All I know is that  I couldn’t bare to see my little Tutter lifeless, even if he was but the size of a pair of cotton balls.

Those strong but tender hands that had once cupped my little dead hamster were cold when I wrapped my own hands around one of his palms.  "His hands are so cold.“  I’d remarked through a shutter and then tears broke free as I stood by the casket that made him seem so small.  I didn’t sob.  I just cried, hard, like a helpless person does.  When my father died we knew he had wanted a close casket funeral but somewhere along the line that idea had received an override by those left to grieve.  He hadn’t wanted people to remember him that way, and after the funeral, I had an inkling as to why.

As I stood both staring and trying to not look at this chicken memories flooded me of pets I’d known to pass.  I was there for my boyfriend when his cat was put to sleep, and when the other began to labor and then died right in his arms.  More than once I had considered how grateful I was to Spooky and Baldric that they had let me be there for them at the momentous occasion that is the end of a life.  Yet, when each feline was buried I had let Jason go alone, unable to look on their corpses.  Afraid of what I might see as they disappeared underneath a bed of loam.

I had always been this way.  When I was a girl and our dog delivered a stillborn litter I sobbed outside on the suburban sidewalk of our street in my nightgown while my younger sister (who wanted to be a nurse) helped my mother deliver the unmoving pups.  When my step-father’s brother killed himself I cried terribly at his funeral and was a ghost of myself for weeks.  It didn’t matter that he and I hadn’t been close.  I barely new him.  At a young age, every one of Death’s intrusive visits were otherworldly and bitter.

And now there was this nameless chicken, it’s death incomparable to my father’s own.  This defiant chicken, who had decided to die during my journey of healing and renewal.  Rude.

She had been refusing to sleep in the coop for days — opting to hide under it at night instead.  While the others piled into the coop to be stowed away from the jaws of coyote or other predators, she scrambled under it to take her chances.  Only when the sun warmed the sky and the coops were opened to let the others flutter out to feed, did she enter to perch alone.

Looking back on it, this behavior was likely indicative that she was nearing the end of her life.  That night she had died under the coop and now she was laying there so still — like a pile of slate feathers.  Morning dew glistened on her neck.  When I’d come upon her I’d gasped in surprise.  It was apparent immediately that she was dead, lying in a completely unnatural slump unachievable in life.

I knew right away that it was unsanitary for her to stay lying there.  It was also my first day completely alone on the farm.  There was no one I could defer the task of moving her to.  No one to set upon this task that I myself had always avoided.  So now here I was howling into the sky, trying to convince myself that this chicken was dead and that no matter how much I didn’t want to touch it I had to touch it and move it out of the pen.

I stood in the sand trying to force my brain to reckon with the fact that the chicken was not going to move.  "It isn’t sick or debilitated.  It’s dead.  It’s not going to move now or ever again.  Really?  Are we sure.”  I had to process, “No it’s really never moving again and nothing I do can change that.  It’s final.”  I felt cold some where deep inside.

I’m on a farm. And chickens die on a farm sometimes.  "Where there’s livestock, there’s deadstock,“ John (the farmer and my host) had warned me with a chuckle.  

"Goddammit.”  The sentimental, mostly vegetarian in me, wanted to say something to mark this occasion which I’m sure my hosts, now callous to chicken death, would’ve have groaned or laughed at.  This chicken didn’t even have a name.  It’s just a chicken.  And now it died.  It’s no one’s fault, it just died and that’s how things were.  "You were a good chicken,“ I finally decided on with a gulp.  Was she?  I have no idea.

I reached down with my work gloves, the body felt heavy and everything in my body crawled.  I stepped back.  Another five minutes explaining to myself things die, and this was my task.  I was going to hold my own on this farm, so help me.

Another round of my mind flashing back to the pets I’d watched surrender to darkness and what I had learned from those moments.  I thought of what it might be like when my dogs pass.  Would I be so remiss then to cradle their small bodies one last time?   My heart broke a little at that thought but I knelt down, took a deep breath and very gently lifted the hen from the ground.

It’s bony feet were curled.  It’s tiny head and bushy neck lulled back almost delicately.  I rested the little body in a tote and found myself adjusting it so that it wouldn’t lay on its head or neck, as though it might find that uncomfortable.  I had to remind myself that she no longer felt anything.  I carried the tote away from my body illogically anticipating the chicken might spring out at me, and then as my boots crunched up the hill I huddled the tote more comfortably to my body.  I trekked along in resigned silence.

I got to the house in time to see that John was just pulling out.  I hadn’t missed him after all.  He lifted the creature by its feet and rest it in the back of his truck. "It took everything in me to pick up that chicken.”  I confessed.  He gave me a smile that was both sympathetic but rueful.

“Sometimes chickens just die, it probably won’t be the last time.” I nodded and wished him safe travels.  He bid me a good day.  I crunched back up the hill and stowed the once again empty tote in my Jeep.

I embarked on this journey largely in part because my father’s death had left me feeling changed, hollow and wounded. Stowed in the confines of a suburban household I was listless, heavy.  The walls became a reflective chamber with no tunnels or corridors towards escape.  There was only rumination of thought like chewing on already regurgitated cud.  I could not obtain peace through anything side of me, it was time to reach outward.

During my walks among the rustling leaves and cool nights however, I had felt free.  Something called me beyond the shores of a linear lifetime spent roaming a cage of drywall.  I yearned to  — if not attain my father’s joy for life and those he loved — then to at least strive towards it.  I wanted to work with my hands, feel fatigue in my body at night and go to bed satisfied with my day’s work.

I thought of my Zazen Buddhist practice and studies.  I recalled, as I often do, the stories of the Buddha, sitting in meditation, legs crossed with his fingertips pressed to the earth. It’s called the Earth Witness mudra.  The story goes that as Siddartha obtained enlightenment under the bodhi tree he reached down to touch the earth, quite literally grounding himself, and the Earth cried, “I am his witness.”  Fibers of carpet and scored linoleum did not offer the same effect I yearned for.  I wanted to go to bed with dirt under my nails.  I wanted to touch the earth.

So I embarked in a camper that’s older than I am and took a chance on this gorgeous farm in southeast Texas ran by one of the most generous married couples I have ever encountered.

Was I designed to be angry?

Is oppression one of the flavors of humanity?

Am I odd to be exhausted from the exertion

That is rage and confinement posing as

A companion animal?

Malformed clay called a country

Help me, help yourself, to a limited helping

Shared amongst too many hands, lungs and throats

Hoarded by the few

Inedible metal what have you done

Indelible devil I call liberator come

The other, marked as a demon

Because they pulled a scarlet letter price tag

From the lapel of our shirts

And with earthen hands said no more

Inedible secretion, pills of plastic what have you done

A convenient death and micro measured worth

Was I designed to be angry

Or for the chaos in me to be ironed out

Into a digestible modular and linear morsel

Laid out on a platter and segmented

Soft boiled and oozing autonomy

Help yourself to a helping of me

Insatiability churned, curdled

Sold into a lump marketed as fermented virtue

Swallowed by cogs

Manifested from bodies grown in fields

And reared beside wheat

To be plucked and dried for other mouths

That hold a monopoly on this life

 A name can not recognize

The tiniest stretch of time

And not an inch of gold will buy a man

More than one’s predestined paradigm

All blood shed is not all bled

It fills the inkwell gone bone dry

Dogs chew on prose and dream and doze

While the writer wonders at letting them lie

You came to me in a fever dream

Accompanied by a tempo of clacking blades

Unbound with arms linked like chain

To ensnare each of these crusades

Regardless of the blankets and pillows

That serve as landscape for hushed words to the wise

I’ll leave you to your royalties

And think of you in my whispered lullabies

The opposite ends of a scale

Work together by pulling away from the other’s end

And somewhere in the balance there

In those chains the word friend does apprehend

Blithe notes exchanged like knives

And minced hearts weighed out for coin

But what you can not tear asunder

Is what is never joined

Darling is not the word I chose for you

But perhaps affection can this revise

Contentment the scale it sits upon

Invoking the adoration of all ones lies