I press. And the aluminum flavored cherry pops. Just juice and life everywhere. Tastes like metal.
Taste kind of hurts. I squeeze and my fingers get wet. Stings like shaving cuts. Stings like exposed dental nerves. Stings like mint near clean eyes. I squeeze.
I twist and the fruit gives in. I watch a tear fall into the glass cup from my cheek. I like lemonade, but why does it have to be like this.
Forth comes the nite. A hallow wind breathes Autumn’s health. Everything has changed, as I implored it do. Branches break without second thought.
The night mare rides, lifting souls lost wandering. I have been wandering. The same shiny sidewalks for at least a several whiles.
The underdog and unlikely are my tribe. The possible and presumptuous are my tribe. The chosen and courageous are my tribe.
You remember the last time I floated over the foot of your bed. Like it was a feverish malaria induced dream. Sweat it out. Sweat it out. Summer memory sweated out. Autumn, rock me to sleep, lay me down. Queen Mab, take a vial of any tears. And use them as special effects when crying is called for again.
Sometimes we artists get depressed. Say it with me, if you know where I am coming from, damn it.
And for any artist, it is complete – the landscape of emotion. If only we could selectively filter the feelings we wished to be expert expressionists of. Instead, we find ourselves becoming expert in depths that weren’t part of our intended life map. But look at us now – so complete. So many landscapes navigated and survived.
Still kickin. This one won’t get me cause I’m a survivor and I’ve survived worse. Carlos Castaneda turned me on to the general spiritual artistic concept that there’s a landscape with three worlds and each world feeds on and expresses a different theme of life. There is a high world and a middle world and a low world. Each one is part of everything you experience every day. What I call the Underworld folk – they actually eat sorrow like it was food. They think a good cry is an appetizer and a collapse to the ground a tasty main course. They eat it, then they transform it into a vital part of living that exists, like it or not: the cloak masquing the sky to reveal a seemingly forever nite. This is the Underworld folk’s energetic career.
When I sob it’s important. It’s nourishment to something. And when I don’t try to hold back my sad, but instead give it away freely like it was a present – my silent contractions, humped shoulders rocking, eyes puffy too much to see much else through – these are gifts not stolen from me, but offered with a spirit of generosity to feed something that can use my dizzy emotional exhaustion for a dessert cherry on top.
Eat this. Take this. Use this. It’s everything I can give right now. Take everything. It’s not mine anyway.
I feel like a pretty free person. Always gauging that one, measuring it up like it was my personal patrol dog responsibility to myself to keep myself free. I dream, I protect my dream, I live my dream and … I’m trapped in this dream.
Dreams can be distracting illusions. I’ve become a dream character. People project onto me. I’m an illusion. I’m not real. I’m not a real person until the dream is reality or gone altogether. When will we really value life for what it is? No dreams. No nothing else. No nothing else.
Do artists think we are better for dreaming? Do machinists think we are better off for not? Either way, maybe we’re just scared this might be it. This is it. That’s all there is. And there’s nothing left to do today, maybe everyday, but live.
I try to act like it’s important to take a machete to this coconut, splatter the walls with sterile, sweet goodness, stick a glass straw in – my favorite paraphernalia – and suck refreshment from the gigantic seed of a potential Thai palm tree. It tastes like it matters. My body responds immediately and with overwhelming positivity. But I feel like a liar.
I’ve been teetering between ignoring-actions of every day chores and next-to-panicked thoughts of insta-tripping to Missouri. Getting right outta here before … before … I remember when I was just getting into raw food and it was so popular with the elder raw community to fly the coop down to Costa Rica. Before Costa Rica needed environmental policies. Before …
Before.
The free spirit I was and am admired them mostly. I wanted to forgo my entire current reality to build my off-the-grid health utopia the way I always imagined I would if I weren’t so restricted by a full momentum system. Part of me also wondered, on a per case basis of course, somewhere in the back of my curious mind if some of these elders hadn’t just given up on society, ran away to paradise, and escaped from the feeling of powerlessness over something that obviously needs aid, with the inability to effect it.
Overwhelm is the enemy of action.
I want to believe in activism, but that requires a system to act contrary to. I want to help, not contradict, right now. I want to do something that matters.
But instead I am sucking down miso and wakame with pumpkin seeds, blue-green algae and turmeric in. I am stopping to feel the sun and breathe the air. I am footing on the earth and letting nostolgia wash over me. I am crying as I suck down a hot cup of reishi/shilajit/ormus gold tea. My road map is to the south and east. But I know I can’t escape.
A few years ago I was emotionally ignorant. More so than today, at least. I was still able to imagine that the word Japan meant something distinctly different than say, the Mexico word. Or the word for my family. Familia. Ohana. They’re just words. It’s an imaginary line on a map. Unrecognizable by space (read: the spirit). From outter spirit, you can’t see the boarders and it’s all the same land, with little bits of water in between and people and animals and plants populating all over it. That ocean is only one huge ocean from out here. Those islands are all connected to the same earth below. Those people are not separate, somewhere far far away with red alert sunrise and radiation bed time stories. Those people are mi familia. And they are in pain.
All day, I feel the pain. I feel the pain like I was the designated feeler for the whole entire world. Like I was the one chosen to feed the underworld beings. Like my tears were the only important thing and everything else was a lie.
I’m not the reporter that says “you are in not danger” and I’m not the leader whom says that eating this food or that food will save your ass. Yes, I am eating well with plenty of fresh squeezed oranges and MSM, too. I read that in Japan after the atomic bomb, the people ate miso with kelp and chlorella to minimize radiation damage. But somehow, eating well does not feel like enough for me. I can feel the pain and I am confused with fear. Now is the time to reach out and look deeply at the world and into the eyes around you. Now is the time to care and explore how deeply we can transform ourselves compassionately. If there is a skill I am coveting right now, it is my ability to sustain care when it’s easier to just go on about my day: buying more raw food products. Working more and harder without looking up. Watching tv that isn’t the news. Drinking coconuts only because I have to.
I’ve never been so grateful for a coconut.
Searching with half-sight for my dignity, dropped somewhere at his feet. Ashamed hands, angry at the heart, finger fine fabrics and precious pillows. Between these cushions, not a crumb of truth to save me.
All of my magick, all of my colors, all of my freedom was a beautiful distraction. In the end, don’t we all have our real lives to tend? I can arch and sing song of giant female empowered. I can think galaxies onto chart. I can forgive with the genuine depth of chosen innocence, you’d think I’d never been wronged. Never been raked. Never been medicated. I can forgive with the blind stupidity of the inexperienced child. But instead, I will forgive with the woman’s used heart. He used it. I used it. I intend on using it again.
Twist the knob and not the knife. Just turn, turn as if forgetting. Make not one noise, hold not one memory of ever having touched me. Cross the carpet with silent, undoing steps, pausing only in the side of the room where minds can be read and lies lose definition.
Until then, keep walking. Let me be.
There’s only one of us here and that’s me. I’m here alone still and again. Taking all that time to myself. To watch myself be myself left all alone. Do I really want to see this?
Just me and myself locked up in this gigantic city. Look at me going out with the vampires, drinking absinthe with ghosts. There I go riding wicked witch of the west coast style down sidewalks and alleys to the theatre, to my best friends’. I’m totally obvious inviting the party over if teacher plants call for circle. I’m entertaining myself making my home a shrine to plants and all their cycles. So this is what I do with my alone time alas?
I catch up on everything – projects, promises, work and travel. I catch up on sleep. I drink my diet because preparing food is such an arduous delay in my day. I develop my magickal practice and end up making a lot of magick. And I feel guilty because I’m consumed by only one thing – none of the things that I see or do – but the only one thing that would put the life in this pomegranate seed, to burst, to bleed with lust attention and life. Only one thing, and that thing does not exist. Am I horrible for wanting more? Am I spoiled because I want more?
It’s the only way I know I am alive. The Want makes my eyes open in the morning. The heart wants the beating. The Want is the life.
And it is not myself, pain and sorrow, that I am lusting after. It is the one of us whom is not here that makes me the ungrateful, urgent, obsessed woman I am. Oh, to steal the fuel from fire – the fire only searches for more fuel. Devour and transform until there is nothing recognizable left. Or suffocate trying.
Oh, Love, come to satisfy me. I will always want more. There is never too much. Give me more.
A graveyeard now, this king sized bed, where jasmine did once grow.
Alone, this shell, this corpse of memories. Forgotten, I decompose.
Walls, you are windows, you are not windows, now a tomb. Cold, silenced, still, looming, locked.
No curiosity, no sunshine finds entry within. No greater cruelty than a woman untouched.
Ever seed a plant inside early spring?
Ever wait and wait, scrutinizing humidity, air flow, soil moisture, temperature and light index with accuracy and attention? Ever notice how there is a magickal day this time of year, when suddenly it’s spring. And suddenly the green unfurling unformed leaf creates itself from … humidity, air flow, soil moisture, temperature, light index and attention? The Zen I grew into by assisting plants is attention. I now know attentiveness.
Ever notice how driving, exiting, escaping at 4am on a desperate solo “road trip to the East coast” is a lot like life?
You know, you tear through what slows you down and you take the highway you’ve never taken before just to see where it goes. And it goes nowhere. And you come back and you keep going east on the interstate you were originally on, imagining the sun rising over an ocean, rather than a desert? Until you are so tired you are dangerous driving half asleep and you pull over to some one-horse prefab town and decide it’s a nice place – boring – but nice. But YOUR NOT NICE! So you park in some apartment complex after getting lost in their circular court drive where all the houses are identical Barbie toys – like Gap – and you listen to Stevie Knicks sing it like it is, as if her lyrics might hold the thing you were looking for in this road trip, but yet untimingly still have not found, eventually falling asleep for the first time in 40 hours still wearing the ear plugs you had tried to use to go to sleep in your own bed some time ago. It’s actually way quieter here in Yonkers 90210 than in your Hollywood. Isn’t driving a lot like life? I now know it doesn’t matter where you go.
Ever notice how much harder cement is than asphalt?
Ever miss your mom and dad like all the time?
Ever watch one candle’s flame light a small space?
Light a candle from the candle; two candles. Light a candle from the candle; three candles. Three times the light. The room is glowing.
And the original candle’s flame never diminished by sharing itself. The Zen I learned from lighting candles is timelessness. The rush is my creation. The rest is my creation.
I now create the rest.
Everythings okay in San Francisco when it rains. Sidewalks slip I save my life and would do it all again. It is December and what a year is turning ’bout to end.
Secret healings dream up nightly how am I to sleep. I didn’t believe I didn’t consider but now I do – must heal. Low clouds cover naked starlet’s sky – this time it’s big.
In San Francisco rain I get to save my life again.
I give up! I give up! I give up! I give up!
This always happens this time of year!
Autumn.
Autumn is happening again and this time it’s in Los Angeles. I can safely say this is my first autumn in Los Angeles. I usually try to be somewhere … witchy as October sets in. Somewhere where the things I feel like doing are right outside your back door. In the woods. Oh, how dark an autumn woods can be.
But this year autumn’s in Los Angeles and something is in bloom again. Oh, devil, it is violently seductive and holds instant access to whatyourelookingfor. I live in a city of 3.8 million people proper, and I smell fantasy in bloom every season. I am hypnotized and I remember turning on my window shield wipers tonite. It has been since February since it rained last. Not that what I swished off my goggles was rain, mind you. More like mist. But enough of it to need one window shield swipe. And then it was over. It rained in LA in autumn tonite.
I detect a pattern emerging. Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t see it, though I try to keep insightful. Here it is: everytime I go to the drum and bass club I come home and write the shit out of my head because I am so high. High for three days from Technical Itch pulled off the stage, ending with the brownest bump of all midsentence. That’s a pro. And I got high. And now I am flying on my broomstick through what feels like the most gentle, most urban eerie onset of autumn ever.
The brighter the sun, the deeper the shadows.
