Late Night Alone

I unfold myself slowly

And step,

Out on to dew-laden grass

The drops pool, 

And lick at my feet

My nerves crying out for warmth

I spin out slowly, each bit unraveled

The elbows, knees and hair

I weep and laugh and let fly

the long stares of children,

the silent thoughts of mothers,

the slow small bruises of angry words, 

The gray matter tangle of soul

Music

The facetious nature of touch and listen

is born here

in musician’s hands,

in the strum of that string, her taut pull

Two words,

they flash and fly across the gray

and one finds in here, this small space,

between gap, pause, and breath

the distinction between touch

and listen.

One is the taste of a hand

the other a line of pedantic tone

written on the strings of a violin,

Begging the fibers of breath

from your chest,

into the air,

into your heart,

by passage of ear.

Manifested on soundboard,

stroked by the fingertips of lovers,

these hands,

at once with joking smiles and serious songs

do they glance and shy and tease,

the facetious beauty of these wild horses,

my touch and your listen.

Beautiful

I am your beautiful whore.

I greeted you with smiles and sweet soft words.

You were comforted.

I have a checklist.

It goes ankles, hands, breasts, lips, cheek, smile, stomach, pelvis, thighs, calves.

Feet not required, as they tell you to run away.

They get insistent, the small sole heats,

and they burn for you to run, run, please, please, run.

Feet aren’t required.

I am the foul slattern who patterns your doorway with my gypsy scarves.

They linger there and stain the air with their sadistic half-slashes of color.

There used to be this space.

Where holy feet fell on prepared ground, like worship.

And her toes, they were blessed.

And her heart, it was gold, with soft touches of white.

I used to be a laugh,

and it was genuine and fine.

There were seeds of promise in it,

they are gone.

She will laugh to find fault.

She laughs at her weakness.

She laughed for softest illusion, love.

She is your beautiful whore,

bought with promise, time, and fear.

she weaves and bends where you’d expect,

though opaque fabric hides well,

the truth is no more than your willingness to search.

Her tears will mingle with your feverish demand

Her struggle, not physical,

the weakened acceptance of this time, that touch, this push, that hug.

She doesn’t blame.

No points, no denouncements,

you are sweet, and lonely, rich.

These things, she understands.

The rub of the soft white muslin on inner thighs and dead closed eyes

She tore at the beautiful skirt, the birthday gift

It came off in a strip of red rose

and impatient he seized her

and weeping, she turned,

and mocking, he split her soul, half for whole,

out and down and in and up and bleeding,

sob, flung into gravel,

the coins that bought Jesus,

scattered about,

and rocks softly ripping the air,

“Whoever is blameless shall cast the first stone.”

Lying Flat on the Dirt Floor Basement of Your Heart

"Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again...You do not have to die to in order to discover the truth of this teaching...You only need to lose track of who you are or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live."

 - Barbara Brown Taylor

Treasure

It's not about trinkets or plunder.
No, this is simply about those things, like good coffee and vests,
that seem to define all you do
In the simple, communal ways
that sepia and antique furniture define old postcards.
We are not the sum of our pieces
But our parts tend to leave little room for excess.
Somewhere, between your love for the people
And the people you love,
I was kicked out of the in-crowd.
It never ceases to amaze me how you can care so tirelessly for the causes of others
they have dog-eared pages from your ever-present hands
And yet feel so hopelessly lost amidst the mess of yourself.

You love...baseball,
and simplicity, black tea and lemon meringue pie.
There is this bookshelf in your house,
filled with sculptures and photographs, things-learned and remembered
And the books are clever-bound, and the medicine hides on the top shelf,
And sometimes, like when the front tire is bent a little
The bike sits there too.
You stood there, gently leaning, and told me, quite calmly
how the acquisition of knowledge doesn't equate to the proliferation of joy.

You love...girls with mousy hair,
political discourse, and physical labor.
There was this time that I was looking at the counter, flour-covered,
and you kissed me, behind my ear, next to my heart,
and it was simple, it involved your arms,
On my hip, around my waist,  and somehow,
between the brush of your lips and the soft, quick speeding of my pulse,
I felt safe, and suffused
With the proliferation of joy that defies knowledge.

A complex cerebral network controls emotional regulation
It processes faces, body language, and pheromones,
It notes the kisses in the corners of people's mouths,
And the soft feeling of one hand in another.
It catches you in its meanderings,
It mesmerizes you with its promises of a short life lived sweetly.
Our ties to one another rest like ghosts there,
neural paths that maintain firing even when the stimulus is gone.
Memories echo in those small, simple spaces, one dendrite to axon, little codes,
softly sighing, across the arm of its brother.

In their flickering signals, I watch myself,
Once, and again,
As you say, "Now? Not now. Maybe later."
You shut the door,
but forget to say goodbye. 

And I've come to the conclusion,
Standing as long as I have in the shadow of your dismissal
That since your heart lies with your treasure,
Never have I been so jealous of jewels.

Glass House Mind Palace

It's amazing what we can convince ourselves is secure.
Like these, these houses of glass,
These shard-filled, light-altering things,
These relationships.
You and I.
We took all the crystal-crazy, outrageously sharp things,
These stories, and ideas, and memories, and ancestral teachings,
And we created this house.
It's beautiful when the light hits it, just so.
So mesmerizing is the effect of our glass palace
that we forget how deadly, how knife-achingly, skin-piercingly dangerous
it is.
And we play,
with these balls and these bricks
And we throw around blame like it's our favorite pasttime
And one of these days,
That glass-structure-house is going to fall.
And we've aided the inevitable end,
with our lies and our secrets
On little tufts of tinder, on scraps and shreds,
these small inconsistencies we've tucked into the nooks and crannies
And, well.
If the bats and the bricks and the screaming and the thrashing don't bring it down,
A fire will.
The hardest thing to acknowledge is the burden of trying to forgive yourself.
And we're all just trying to make sense of the way that the light reflects on the glass
and the way that bumping into corners sometimes leaves cuts that are so clean the edges just heal right back together.
You handed me these pieces.
I'm so obsessed with gluing more blue to the already rainbow walls that I forget how crazy building a glass house actually is.
Your pieces were cracked.
I mean, really, truly cracked.
Like you'd snapped them, and re-seamed them, and handed them to me,
Carelessly, an abandoned thought.
I religiously placed them in the ceiling.
I glued them in with tears.
They made such beautiful light there.
Instability is like a well-worn coat
It's always been this way, it must be normal.
I have a glass house.
I made it right here.
It expands and it shrinks,
It snaps and it breaks,
It lacerates, and manipulates,
it operates and truncates,
My heart is now a half,
My fingers sliced to bits,
I live in a glass house.
I walk on crushed dreams
I re-live my nightmares
I eat the silica dust.

I just read this on Facebook.


It made me realize just how on edge I have to be, all the time, to make sure I don't get hurt. I don't even realize it anymore! It's so much a part of every day, of watching my actions constantly, that I don't conciously register how unfair and wrong it is that I have to constantly make sure I'm not looking at someone the wrong way, or I could get raped. I mean, folks, let's be perfectly clear - there's a BIG ol' gap between giving someone the wrong look on accident and having them take it to mean, "Ah, yes, this woman is free game! She must want to get raped!"

What the hell is wrong with the world? I read the article above and I just kept saying to myself - "Yep, that's happened to me. Yep. Yep, I've had to go through that before."

So I decided to write my own list. We'll cover recent things, since those are the most salient for me right now.

Starting with wearing shorts to the grocery store. Now, the background to this story is that I moved to The Netherlands in September of last year (2011). I quickly realized that I live in a very "ethnic" neighborhood. There are a lot of Turkish, Moroccan, Ghanaan people here, and many of them are Muslim. Most of the women in my neighborhood wear hijabs.

But it was hot one day in September. So I wore shorts to the grocery store. The minute I stepped out of the house, I knew something was wrong, and I instantly regretted what I was wearing. I kept feeling the eyes of men on the corner of the street drifting towards me. I heard snickers from a group of teenage guys walking down the road. When I finally got to the grocery store, I ran in and bought one or two things. I went to go check out, and two men stepped into line behind me. They immediately started an animated, loud conversation about how easy I must be, seeing as I was audacious enough to wear shorts. There were several remarks about my ass, and whether they should take the effort to try and get me alone. I checked out, and went outside to my bike, horrified and ashamed. They followed me outside, and were about to get into their car, when they decided wolf-whistling at me would be a better use of their time. I left, almost crying.

Going to Utrecht Central station in the morning, getting to a school visit. I'm dressed up, because I want to look nice for teaching. I'm trying to avoid the gazes of several men kind of lurking around in the station - who comes to the train station so early? I buy a ticket, and turn around to find my departure platform. A man stands in my way. "Hey." He says, and I try to walk around him. "Hey!" He follows me, I turn around abruptly and ask, shortly, "What do you want??" He gives me a wolfish grin, and slurs out, "You know, you look really beautiful. I gotta lotta stuff I could offer a really beautiful woman, you know?" Disgusted, I walk away, trying to get into the company of other people, trying to get away, to wipe off the sick, sticky feeling of his eyes on me.

Walking through Cardiff last weekend. I got lost trying to make my way home after dinner. Thankfully, I was with two other girls. I don't think they ever realized how bad our situation was - for which I think they can be forgiven, they were young.

I was wearing a black skirt, fell right above the knee. Absolutely terrifying. Sick-in-your-throat, worried about every dark corner, hurriedly walking forward, having no idea where you are, not wanting to walk back through the groups of men on the corners...Outside a small restaurant, a guy calling out, "Hey! You look lost! You lost chicky? C'mon, I'll help you. C'mere! C'mon!" His friend: "Yeah, shit, man, I like that skirt! Hey, sweetheart, I like that skirt! Come over here, we'll help you!" When I said no, friend and guy: "Well, fuck you then! I hope you get lost! Get fucked!" Running away, terrified they would follow.

Biking home from the gym in gym-shorts yesterday: Got to the area around my house. Everyone on the street is turning and looking. Several people shout as I go past, saying everything from, "Put that away!" and "Get some pants on!" to "C'mere baby!" "Heeey!"

I was wearing gym shorts. I did nothing wrong except wearing shorts, showing off - I don't even know what! My knees, if that!

These are only the most recent examples. This is a constant struggle. It has happened to me on the streets of Athens, OH, and it has happened to me in cities like Utrecht and Cardiff. I don't ever think about this, but damn. Think about how stressful it is, to constantly worry about how you look, how you might catch people's eye accidentally, and they see that as a trigger to start coming after you.

Let's be fair, folks. Being righteously angry about this isn't militant feminism, it's just...normal. It's just the desire to feel safe, to be able to walk around and not worry about the groups of men, the people sort of following you down the road, right at the corner of your vision. Is that rational? Is that a reasonable request to make?