What you didn't know

(Pre-Script: This poem should be read as the song, "Somewhere Only We Know" plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)
You gave me a card with a picture
on the front that you unknowingly
pulled out of the dream I've been having
for 17 years,
the one image I had yet not figured out,
the one image I had not yet told you about,
at least not with words,
and then I knew.
Seeing in front of me on paper what I had only been seeing
on the inside of the bones of my skull
told me in an instant
what 17 years of analysis had not,
and I did not need to read what was inside-
there were words you had written
but they were someone else's language,
did not make sense to me, because
they were wall words,
and I was lightening, and what does lightening
understand of concrete,
except to illuminate the truth of it,
except to shatter it in two.
(Why are you so afraid that I
am not afraid of your truth?)

-XOXO

Alone in a room with a child

(Pre-Script: This poem should be read as the song, "Blackbird," #22 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

i am alone in a room with a clock,
and the clock has large red numbers.

Scratch that, i am not alone,
a child is in the room with me,
one so small and quiet and still
you could forget she was here for
half a second. I can hardly see her in
the dark pale light, she looks like a
lump of blanket; but then she sighs
in her sleep, a giving up of the last breath
she had been holding too long,
lets it out like finally.
If only waking hours could align in such a peace.
Tonight, a separate stillness,
as i stay awake
in a room where she sleeps

-XOXO,

Dead Seagulls

(Pre-Script: This post should be read as the songs, "Other Side Of The World," then "If I Die Young," #34 and #38 on the playlist, play in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on those songs in that order, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

I guess I never noticed before today how many dead seagulls a girl can find at the beach. I swear I saw at least 5 seagull carcasses, and on a smallish patch of beach, too. This is starting to sound like some kind of ecological message about saving the planet, but the thing is, and this is what disturbed me about the situation today, seagulls aren't even pleasant when they are alive. Dead, they're good at decomposing and stinking up your airspace. Alive, they are good at crapping on your head and chasing around your potato chip clutching toddler. Either way, they are rude. Either way, they are only good at ruining your picnic.
I talked to a woman a few years ago who told me that because she was from Illinois, she had always thought that seagulls were really cool birds. To her landlocked mindset, seagulls seemed like some kind of magical, mystical creature, like something out of Greek mythology or something symbolic of freedom, so close they were to the ocean and the sky and therefore God and such. It wasn't until she moved her family to a California beach town that she understood the mindset of those who actually live among seagulls; that they are, more accurately, rat birds.
Unfortunately, by the time she and her family understood this, her daughter already had seagulls tattooed all across her back.
I don't mean to sound heartless; I am truly not pro-extinction of any species. Save the Seagulls and let's live together in harmony and give peace a chance and all of that. But it was clear to me, today, at least, that feathers and stink are all that that remains of a life spent squawking after the hopes of someone else's cookie crumbs.

-XOXO,

Burning

(Pre-Script: This post should be read as the song, "Superman," #2 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

I remember being inside of a building that was exploding. The thing is, I had seen it from the outside, shining as the sunlight bounced directly off of it's walls, so straight and tall; I could see the first shiver in the shining off of one of the windows, the shift in the light, and instead of running away, I ran straight towards it; right to the very center of the building, and stood there as the structure exploded around me. This is a strange position to be in, or at least uncommon. Around me, things crashed, electric wires got tripped and there were sparks and color almost like fireworks, but all I could hear was the constant underlying hum and crash against crash. When I looked down, sparks were coming off of my fingertips-I had touched some electric current, and it had left me charged, a live wire, so everything I touched was made electric by my internal flame. Strange to stand in the middle of your own implosion, and feel nothing, and be nothing, except just a part of it, the heart of it, but that cannot be true can it? To know that you have become the girl with electric fingers? Yes, it can, and it is maybe not so strange after all.

-XOXO,

Beautiful when you cry

(Pre-Script: This poem should be read as the song, "Closer," #35 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

It took a lot of courage
to place your bullet in my chest.
But what I want to know is how
did it feel
to remove it first from your own heart,
with no anesthetic, not even a hand to squeeze,
a shoulder to bite down on,
just your own raw bloody fingers pulling
at a thing so deeply lodged it was as if
you could pull apart your own center of gravity
and free fall forever.
("you're beautiful when you cry," he said)
I want to remind you that even if your fingernails
scratched your skin (or mine? Forgive me if I forget which

is which sometimes) in the process of raw surgery,
you were as gentle as possible
but a bullet in the chest is still a bullet in the chest,
you know?
There are so many of them in the world, and sometimes
we get caught in the crossfire
left to bleed out-
One should never bleed out alone, one
should have another heart, of matching intensity

to share the weight of all of our deepest bullets,
and you found mine
and did the bravest thing you could, even
if it was the only thing you knew how to do
or, more likely,
that nothing else was anything you possibly could do-
and you said, "you're beautiful when you cry."
you're beautiful when you cry.

-XOXO,

(for my favorite donkey)

Hopes Of Humpbacks

(Pre-Script: This poem is meant to be read as the song, "Arms," #34 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

On this much sand,

you stood;

the solid thing,

so I held on.
In front of us,

dolphins dove deep

our focus was the

horizon, our hopes of humpbacks.

Waves washed our feet til
i forgot or remembered or both
that the crashing in need not feel so tragic,
the shattering so sharp and jagged-
we'd followed the shell line to here this far;
my colored glass hid in your pocket.

-XOXO

Cathedrals in my heart

(Pre-Script: This post, once again, should be read as the song, "Every teardrop is a waterfall" plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

I was looking at a picture of a cathedral somewhere in France. It was intimidating to look at, tall and looming like a nightmare or a question I have yet to answer. It was built with careful attention to detail, which took a lot of time, skilled craftsmen, industrial equipment. Some people build these kinds of things naturally, or almost naturally, and they go to classes to learn the part that does not come naturally to them. They spend years perfecting the engineering science behind the craft.

But I am not the kind of girl who has any large stones or stained glass lying around, or power tools, or even any particular skills. I don't even own a hammer. I am the kind of girl who gets distracted by the glue drying on my hands from where I was building a Popsicle stick house, of the "design-as-I-go" variety. At some point, my fingers get too glue sticky to finish the project, so I am distracted peeling long layers of glue off of my hands; it now has my hand prints imprinted in it; if you didn't know it was glue, you might think I was peeling off my own leprosy. This is like an interesting form of such soothing therapy that I don't even notice that my Popsicle sticks have fallen over, into a sticky shapeless mess that you would never know I had spent any time focusing on arranging.

Things crumble around me.

I do not take it personally,

though maybe I should

pay a little more attention.

Instead, I peel skin glue,

but what I really want is the cathedral,

the answer to my own question,

and a choir inside, singing in perfect pitch so that anyone traveling past will stop and marvel at the echoes enlarging it's magnificence.
This year, maybe I'll ask for a hammer for Christmas. Maybe I'll ask for some plaster of Paris.
-XOXO,