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// Here Is The Flood (Audiofiles) //

 

 

This is an excerpt from “Here Is The Flood” — one of the opening pieces in my upcoming book Luminae.  You can click play to hear me read the full piece.

I find that one of the hardest things to do is to try to speak about why I write. For me it’s about going deep enough within to a place where one can find the breathtaking beauty in pangs of sorrow, and terrible longing even inside joy.  Whenever I write it seems more and more is revealed to me about the paradox of what we are as humans. Though I know I’ll never be able to grasp it in full, I believe somewhere in the search for myself lies the truth of who I am. It is that elusive truth which keeps me coming back to the page.

I hope you enjoy this piece. I hope it sparks something creative inside of you.

Luminae will be available on Amazon beginning November 15th.

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// Bodies. Shadows. Servants. //

In the dream, pieces of the body and face were coming away, large portions of the jaw, craters of flesh had been removed from the arm and the leg. Hair was coming out in plastic clumps though I did not appear to be losing hair. The full breasts were bare and whole, the abdomen white and shining. Teeth were coming out. Fingers crumbling away. It became impossible to function with effectiveness in the world with a body which was apart from itself, disappearing, disintegrating. I had become a film of myself as if projected on a wall.

Upon waking the joy of feeling whole was a deep crimson warmth. Some visions reflect light, some absorb. We are a constant, though everything is birthed to be swallowed again by the waves of a sea which heaves and vanishes. Each curl, each star, each hand to the mouth, an opening. Many will interpret dreams, they will have their own words, their own made up diagnoses which if you listen will tear your throat away from your voice, the only voice you need will be severed, rusted. Sink inside and reach with your mind into the heart, unearth yourself, till your soil, your seed, drink your own rain water.

The being which is the self knows. The being which had been closed off again returns, quietly. The human creature can dig into its own body and resurrect the spirit of secrets, the gauzelike whispers of things we have held bound inside the tissue for centuries. The messages pounded and spread into us through anguish and ecstasy. Grinding of bones, wails of anger, greed, unfathomable torture and pleasure. Those things which float within us which we clutch and release, everything we reach for we reach for inside this place no one else can see. We are coming apart in ways we have yet to understand. Collectively, privately. We have not yet begun to touch all we are designed to touch. The falling out is the beginning. Where we crumble we consume ourselves; bodies, shadows, servants of light.

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// Kiss You All Over //

The words come as I forget to eat and try to catch them
sand falls through time.
I hope you dream bigger than this.
I hope that you do not give up or turn to face
the darkness
without tucking your fingers into the hands
of the light.
Hold them close when they are madness
let their voices sing in your mind
when they leave you for dead.
The people who come too close
are afraid.
The ones who leave
still teach if you can learn not to let fear
take you under.
This life as she looks you in the eye
is falling away from under your feet
do not stop
do not give up
do not keep the words in drawers
but if you need to
go away for a long time
and let the sea kiss you
all over.
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// It Does Not Name What It Wants //

I felt an overpowering need to be alone with something impossible to name. It had hands clutched full of the flesh of silence which multiplied without end. There was no one in that place. Everyone had left and they had each pulled one of its doors shut behind them. I was very alone. It was very dark, it was very peaceful, I was afraid. I was very afraid it would end and that it would never end. It was womanlike and dim, a love that could only breathe you out and breathe you in this way. It could only flower in solitude. It would only expose itself one to one, face to face, mouth to mouth.

A mysterious union which was without need for bodies, it was body-less. Forbidden and yet met with an almost primitive expectation. The pain and terror of all the world rested its head in this place.
An apex. A resuscitation.
It was a life invading itself where death had long been its only comfort.
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I have carried the buds of a thousand gardens inside of me, many lifetimes have I been caressed against my will. I have produced and offered the milk and the honey, the fire and the water and the abuse. I have been unable to bloom, longing to encircle my thick vines around the precious feet of the marbled gray daylight. All I want now is to be alone with this unknowable thing and to let it feel me, I want to feel inside of it with my tongue, with my fingers, with my body and blood, with my consciousness and my subconsciousness, in waking and in dreams, to penetrate it with the poison which consumes me and give it a punishing pleasure. I want to stretch into its glistening web and learn to obey the strange fluid rhythms of its body-less pulse.
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We speak too loudly and too often. We are murdering something which cannot leave.  I cannot bear any longer to sleep outside of it. There is a place beyond this one, it lives inside. It hopes no one will come to the door. It hopes no one will understand its words, it wants to close in around itself and return the light to its tomb underground. It gives birth to its own time. It chews its own limbs and destroys its own space. It wants to make love to the darkness and water its wings with the tears that fall like petals from the last sighs of the last stars. It is perpetual. It does not name what it wants.
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// Liar //

I know you are not listening.
I know there is a voice which speaks to you
and you hold its neck beneath the
waterline;

choke the truth
that’s choking you.
You are silent, thrumming in stoic madness
to keep it hush.

It is silent
but the truth is a disease with no breath
carried along on the scarred back of eternal breeding.
It has no heart for beating

or not beating,
shadowboxing with the pulse of
a faceless time of day,
swing and a miss

and miss, miss, miss.

What you fight is what is biting
you, the Mistress and her missing fingers and
her broken window teeth.
She is there despite you

in you because of what you are
and the howl in your stomach is filling
itself as you swallow its tongue
cursed hunger without permission

filling itself with rage.

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// Chance of a Lifetime //

There have been chance moments within all of this, moments of madness and grace,
which I fear I will surely forget. But for now I am here with you and the twilight is sliding across your face. For now your eyes holding mine and the way our fingers become whispers become the lengthening of necks become flesh over the fragile bones of dreams come back to life, for now I will feel everything. I will shatter and I will expose and I will untie all the things about myself that I have kept bound in the dark halls of my petrified being for ages. So that when this moment has gone, when it has become part of the next, and these small things become smaller and smaller still as they walk the eternal distance of time, I will have been made into everything I could have become. Because I let it all in and I let it all go and this is the magnificence, and this is the miracle of the blood of the life we are invited to know, when life is allowed to open and to close and to flow.

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// Pieces of the Whole (In Me) //

I am learning to look back and see that every cycle, every phase of the things I have been through, they each needed the space and time and energy they needed. That is simply the truth.

There was nothing I could have rushed through and nothing I could have prevented because I was unfolding in two ways at once: in love and in fear of love. And these two streams were crisscrossing each other all the time exactly as they were set in motion. I made choices, of course, but each was made from that intersection of love and fear of love.

I can see that now, however briefly, however fleeting that clarity may be, I can see my life, my love and fear-of-love story, as whole. As complete in the way it met and did not meet my expectations of myself.

There is a place which is a way, which is a way of thinking about these things without judgment. It’s a center, a balance, we can seek out if we can trust ourselves enough that it exists. This place within is where we cut ourselves free, let ourselves off the hook for whatever we believe the past held for us. What it gave to us and what we gave in return can be what they are.

It is really tough to dwell within that clarity and it moves ever in and out of focus.  But through some kind of madness or miracle, it can be done.

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// A While On Sadness //

Maybe not everyone will like it but I wanted to write a while on sadness. I needed to.

Why? Because this is something we all live with, live within. It’s all around and underneath our fingernails, our tongues. Sadness is upon our shoulders, in the hand of our minds. I want to write from it, I want to become her lips and bones and match my heartbeat to hers.

I want to listen.

The only thing more crushing than sadness is sadness which is lonely.

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// Random Acts of Blindness //

The warm stained scent of wet city sidewalks and all the ways I struggle to say what I mean. I don’t know anymore if that is voluntary or medicinal but I’m often overwhelmed by the possibility that it might be either. Or both (I know it’s always both).

I flip through vacant magazines and pace the floors barefoot but all I can see are storm clouds closing in on me.  The second you walk out the door they move in. What happened to the way you used to make poetry out of flickering skylines? Whatever became of the sun setting behind my tender flesh and how it used to spark the bones we traded. If I had any words left I would give them all to you. I would sit underneath your shadow and pretend to be protected.

Did you ever want to run away with me? Search my eyes for the deep blue rivers of a time you had forgotten but still believe in? You come to me in dreams but so do so many others.

Heavy rain slides down the kitchen window. So many things that happen like lightening seem to last forever. I watch as raindrops make patterns of circular chaos in the cracks on the pavement and I know a journey into me is a journey straight into the center of the earth. I know I am not easy and the pressure gets inside your head. The way you look at me is your gray lungs getting weak.

You are orange slices and sticky fingers, so sweet, so goddamn inconvenient. The way you rip the names off of everything and throw my longing back at me in the words you so carelessly choose. We rehearse the end and then we welcome the mistakes in all over again, lighting cigarettes one after another in the dark for hundreds of thousands of years. Your terrible lips and your beautiful eyes, your pearl teeth in the moonlight glistening. Even through all this blindness I can still hear you smile.

I can still remember how my dimples curled themselves against your swollen need for satisfaction. I cannot find the words to tell you gently that I’m trying so hard not to be gone when I’m with you. So hard that I write about thorns tearing rose petals, that I have often secretly hated myself for being and not being with you.

When I was very small I learned that pink bleeding hearts are flowers, and once they tell you they never tell you again. You kiss the way nothing lasts forever. We make love the way civilization collapses apart without making a dent in the universe.

Do we touch or just open our mouths.  And are we talking past each other now.

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// On the Other Side of the Carnival Smoke //

I remember you, you despite everything else which has faded from my memory. Even when my light is dark and my skin is crumbling graystone, here you are, like the most beautiful shadow falling upon the hills and caverns of my shoulders. I remember we walked, we walked all night to smell the buds of the roses climbing the trees. Observed in quiet stillness the death of a carnival, rusted in the dew of cherry cigarette glow.

Passing by the water, you take hold of my hand and I come alive with ecstatic electricity. Why would you do that (how could you not)?  We have belonged among these shared ruins for quite some time, where even the darkest secrets choke and expire.

Romance is nothing compared to war. The bridges all on fire overhead. Some will not make it to the ones waiting for them on the other side. These are the ones you must look out for, you must learn better to recognize mourning. It will be odorless, it will come to you wrapped in a plastic smile. We write love letters to the universe, we write ransom notes by connecting the stars in the northern sky and grabbing love by the cords on her wrists.

We write because no one ever told us these things would happen.

We became wings as all feathers tend to do when they gather close enough and the sunlight over the ocean kisses them with just enough promise. I offer you my tongue and you remove the metal fences from my throat. Two small animals, soft, wet, unafraid. I undress as you separate my ribs and whisper your words like small mouths into my heart, in response she beats for another century (or more) only for you.

And all the tears that pour forth from my eyes which never dare to seek the sun, they will turn this trembling earth again green. All the colours of the wind are made of pigments I had never seen. Here is the tomb of the little unknowns, here is the way they walk the nighttime ceilings. Here is the way I kneel at the foot of the bed and listen to my own blood slamming in my chest.

It sounds like the dawn may return any day now. Amen amen amen, I carve myself upon these words made flesh. I hear the faintest sounds of stirring, like maybe this time we will all rise to greet you, but I have been wrong so many, many times before. My pain bears a panic you wouldn’t believe.

And sometimes the weight of this desire tugs so deep it splits me clean in two.

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