dabbling in scribbles

I’m in the process of financially recovering after what I can now see was a sort of mental health breakdown. I missed a lot of work–actually quitting my previous job and forcing myself to move on in life. But I am struggling, extremely struggling. I have a car payment that must be taken care of ASAP, am trying to gather funds for future schooling, desperately need to return to therapy to aid in coping with my disorders, am in urgent need of being stable enough to move out of my mother’s house, and I need to basically fund-raise in order to even begin working on my photo/poem project. But I don’t have the funds to do any of this, and it’s practically impossible for me to even think of gathering enough money to do all of these things. My army, what I want to ask of you is if any of you are willing to donate to my PayPal to help keep me afloat. Things are hard, and I have no right to come to any of you in this situation but god, I’m desperate. I’m trying my best and it’s proving so much more difficult than I imagined.

The link to my PayPal account is in my blog’s description where you can donate any amount of money you’d like.

And if you’d rather not donate, I also have my Etsy shop linked on my blog where you can buy handwritten/autographed copies of my poetry for just $3 + shipping, along with a few other items.

You can also now help me out by purchasing a copy of my second poetry collection Maintaining Survival through CreateSpace. The price is $14.99 for over 375+ pages of content. Click here to purchase a copy.

Anything at all helps, and it’d mean the world to me.

I once heard an old Egyptian tale about a man who walked 3,600 miles

through the desert just to get home to his wife, who was dying a slow death

from a rattlesnake wound. As soon as he got through the door,

he kissed her so hard her bones cracked. Tonight I’m reminded of this

as you slowly pull off your shirt, lifting it over the top of your head

with both hands as I’ve seen you do countless times before we made love

on the floor, the table, the dining room. The thin white cotton falls

to the carpet like a snake shedding its skin.

You reveal yourself to me.

Every scar climbing up the inside of your arms another mile,

the ones that cross each other in the middle like railroad tracks

another two miles, the ones that shine the brightest- three.

I count them and realize that each one was a reason for survival,

and survival is not a number divisible by any other number.

So, instead of arithmetic, I hold you tonight,

picturing the red blood cells making their way through

your blood vessels, which would be over 80,000 miles long

if laid out end to end. When I feel your collarbones become wet,

I take a tear on the tip of my finger and gently slide it

into your mouth. Here, I said. Taste this.

You’ll never find anything else like it. That’s what surviving tastes like.

But in my head I was really thinking about that old Egyptian man,

and how he eventually made it home to his wife, yet here I am,

not even a millimeter away from you,

The Cinder Cone Treehouses. A structure of two treehouses, a skating bowl, and a wood-fired soaking tub. The construction took about 12 months in total and costed around $170,000. One treehouse acts as a workshop and the other is for living. There is electricity and even Wi-Fi! Located in Skamania, Washington.