either or

that is a funny place in life
when you hold yourself out
in front of you
and either
what you see is strangely
unrecognizable
or
you recognize yourself
for what feels like
the very first time

Walking tonight

Bundled to the brim and adorned with
popcorn and hot cocoa my kids and I
left the warm of our evening home
to see lights light the streets like night on
Christmas fire. The spectacular feeling
it sparks like childhood and leaping out
to do something silly and free like laughing.
I knew Joey never felt it and Addy didn't
remember it so we went in case they might.
And in case they don't it's just as fine.
So we walked cold blocks to see big homes
in little rows together like friends sharing
silent night and themes in twinkling unison.
And along our rather quiet walk alone us three
I saw a car roll slowly past and at the wheel
a small white-haired woman in glasses all alone
peering up and out her rolled down window to marvel
at our same sight. I couldn't help but notice
the look held on her so silly and free looked
just like the one on the faces of my children
and I imagine--rather, hope--on mine as well.

December

if these twinkling merry nights slip through their fingers
long silk navy ribbons round evergreen
less than starry memories can hold in
or hold alive
it will be alright

tiny December palms hold fast
one hand at a time
to let go means just
letting go

will you remember? I beg will you
remember? but others hold memories in
places we cannot keep for ourselves

without wondering they are
too cinnamon steamed and warm bodied
to know why it matters to hold anything at all

why would they when
loss has never knotted them

it is alright
to stay right here instead of
retracing circles round faint
shadows stretching thinner

I hope they skate across many twilights
until a warm scent
a feeling unties

starry dreams
long silk ribbons round evergreen
just like December

the giving and the getting

I've burned myself down to the very end of my consumer string; what once was long and seemingly endless has ended. What's worth wracking my brain over, anyway. Materials I need to fill up my emptiness or accessorize my esteem when all I want is to bottle up time in a glass room and clutch the words of the book that has longed for me to read her, long years waiting, and to memorize her love story. If only I could become a dear friend to what stands unused and already written. If the book was to sneak away in the middle of the night, I would lament only that I did not read her in time. That I always knew that the night would come.  

I could ask my family and friends to rewrap my collections and regift them to the people who will repurpose them beyond their sedentary station in my life - wool mittens for frostbitten hands and artwork for blank walls and perfume for a small, leathery woman who hasn't smelled something so sweet since her mother went away.  Why is it so shameful to admit that I want nothing sewn in threads or wrapped in paper; to say that I hope my kids don't confuse wanting things for needing love. To admit that all I want are the things I need: love, grace, mercy, wisdom - like songs, packaged in the air and the clouds and the day's quiet light. I wish my best friend could tie herself to the sun, or that family could traipse across my falling sky or across the sky of my children - that they could look up and see how many little clouds are trying to reach them. I wish I could catch the autumn leaves before they hide beneath winter's jacket, form them into page one by one, so that they may know - every living thing matters, and every word breathes life if it is true. I wish that I could wrap my day's short sorrow in a crimson red blanket to remember how warmed I am by privilege and how heavy my heart is when I forget it.

The giving and the getting game - I get it. But all I want for Christmas is to give what I have away. It is, anyways, the greatest and only portion I can offer.

"The greatest gift is a portion of thyself." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:21

brief lovely life

tin drizzles over a sleepy house
a small quiet world
brief lovely life

little pause of night so sweetly
slips by asleep or else
toes tip across cold kitchen tile
hot black coffee drips
steam lifts a white mug to a tame tongue
to sit and be
in a room with no angles
noticing details of life

tin drizzles over a sleepy house
a small quiet world
brief lovely life




    

I used to not give the world so much credit. These days from down here I see a world full of people, seven billion I guess, mostly trying, as best they can, with what they have, and what they know. Trying for what? well,  that's a different observation. But I'll leave judgment be since I couldn't tell you what even one person's trying for including, me.

Writing through the block

What do you do when description falls flat; when the parched volcano sleeps. When lost letters drop dull wood in a brushfire of spelling accidents. What do you do when your hand thickens, a grandmother's heavy iron pot stirring numb starch to a slow, slow, stop. When you are feeding no one.

When apathy trickles, a wound of atrophy and a colorless hour skitters over an old moon face, a lodged rock, there by God and permanence. Shadows wander away beneath cloudy capes shuddering - things are partially as they appear and, not. It tricks me to think I can see through it.

It is this crescent belief that cannot be seen that chases me down like figments, through windless trees, to write on and on and wait.

child artist to adult reporters

a brilliant child artist crept lonely shades over a canvas wall
fine adult reporters swarmed his neck near the art price

one female statue eagerly asked him to describe
exactly what was going through your mind as

you created this - arguably your finest collection piece
to which his hands trembled a glass heart

understood what she wanted to hear
and greater what she couldn't

his finger lifted towards the brushstrokes his
voice replied 'that' and they hung on to get it

broke his only try with their notepad chuckle the
scratching word of what plain hid everything and nothing

The Other Social Network

Graffiti spray paint bottles dripped the first world wide

attempt.

Devils Disciples to Mara Salvatrucha.

Addicted expression outside lines of: proper and schooling.

Human web implosion inside urban economies lacking,

including: 

1 book split between 5 void bellies no bigger than

your own child's fist. 

You can't dial up virtual parenting.

I mean, 

even Jobs couldn't redesign disease or
compute his own cure.

They tattoo flesh and walls a social network why in the world would you do that. 

We're not talking junior mischief and thug crap kids these days, don't have 
anything better to do than 
destroy for fun.  

This is spilling of inhumane suffering starving for material
killing for family and 

attention.

Over pasta and salad news reports there was no warning. 

What a damn shame.

If the neighbor crying would step left we could compare

the scene to our neighborhood.

One safe meal and seven worthless miles away.
To shrink our lost world, we would...

Why don't those parents get the hell out of there. 

And when they do, don't come here.  

We other classes digitize our own uncensored graffiti postings

borrow endless walls and message boards

wars of word retaliating absolute nonsense. Communities of aliases to 

belong elsewhere.  

Group identification and categorization must only be a corporate 

marketing strategy. Only they get to throw up signs, call them: logos. 
So basically: only people who afford them can have instincts. 

The rest can have them once they prove consumer value.

One thousand online CSR oaths.

Empowerment, next generation, sustainability, etc. etc.
No need to destroy a thing because we'll do it for you.
Then you paypal us to fix it. 

Urban smiles in business suits advertise well. three hundredths of a cent per hit.     

Happy symbolism for the rest of us: 

We earned our own fortune of family since no one below us
proves we didn't. 

Still the other network flails tagged limbs in useless failure to start-up

despite igniting daily trafficking of: 

raucous midnight messages

help wanted boards

over a million hits 

statistics ratings

search bars

click click. 
click
:)  

  

What DID my dad do?

A parent's day job is a mystery no kid is trying too hard to figure out.

After years of childhood oblivion, I eventually paused to learn a few interesting facts about my dad's occupation: he worked at Ford, took leftovers for lunch, had a beat-up brown briefcase, designed stuff on large scrolls of paper. As for my mom, who went back to work as an x-ray tech when I was 9, all I knew for sure was that she wore a cool white coat, snapped pictures of bones, and brought home free poster board when my brother or I had a school presentation.

I never thought too much about any of it. Most kids don't. At least, not until they start trying to network for a summer job, and even then, kids care more about who their parents know than what they actually do.

But now as an adult, if I had to guess, I'd say it's because parents know - kids care less about what they do at work because they care much more about who they are at home. Because it's at home, not at work, where the real lessons and mistakes and silliness and all the good, deep stuff in life dwell. Because where you went to school actually says less about who you are than how many recitals you show up to or if that look of pride remains in your eyes, even when, especially when - they strike out, they miss, they come in last place. Because moms and dads know that children spend their whole lives trying to impress them and not the other way around. They know this because they are still the children of parents, too.

Kids never ask us for our parental résumé. Maybe they should. But imagine that. On our really off days, they might never hire us. And technical skills? Throw'em out the window. Can you build a fort? Can you do the chicken dance? How realistic are your animal sounds? Demonstrate three. Now six more. Everything's par except the zebra. Needs more bray, less squeal. Take him down an octave. Practice before round 2 interview. Now let's talk management: How do you handle stress? How do you handle stress when we scream? You scream too? You throw yourself, where - on the bed? On the floor! Okay you're fired. Fine one more chance - quantitative assessment: how many hugs per day per child? Kisses per day? Pieces of candy? Not bad. You've recovered from the zebra setback. Come back for round 2 after Dora's over. Grill cheese in the meantime. Please.

As for our "real" résumé, the only part of it that kids really care about is that last optional line: "Personal interests/hobbies." Here, kids do in fact care about what their parents do...with them (and, might I add - for them). 

In any case, it's not such a bad thing that our kids don't bother themselves with trying to figure out what we as parents do. It only reinforces just how beautifully their minds work - that indeed, and so rightly - our children are impressed by the greatness of our love, not the greatness of our title.

Now if only the rest of the world could measure us the same...

Uninvited

I heard the door creak open, his momentary silence. Then from the long hallway down I felt the quiet vibrations of his familiar waltz - four small paws rapping nearer, ta-tic, ta-tic, ta-tic, needle nails filing on my hardwood floor. Finally, he arrived. Stood. Licked his chops. He pressed his uninvited nonchalance against the footstep of my uncomfortable writing corner, and I knew exactly why. He cleared his throat and did what I knew he would: nothing. So I acknowledged him with a dull wave. He sharpened his eyes. Still, nothing. So he sharpened them again to crack me.

"What?"

"You know," he slurred like a sly, fat secret, "not everybody is going through some inner-angst crisis of misidentity." The way he enunciated that last word, mis-i-den-ti-ty, drove me mad. I tightened my lips. He rolled his thin muzzle in the air and repositioned himself closer. From the edge of his jaw, through his fox teeth, he slipped out: "You know that darling, right?"

I shrugged. "So?"

"Well alright," he continued, flipping his white-tipped tail back, and then forth, then back again. "I'm just here to give you fair warning, that's all."

"That's all what?" Now I was the one who was staring.

"Just all of this--" he pointed his wet nose towards my laptop. "Well, I suppose I should just have at it. Don't be such a dreary doldrum, darling. Your melancholy search for - what shall I say? meaning? - it's quite the bore, don't you agree? Some of us know quite specifically who we are. Have known for a very, long, time." Then he shivered, like he had caught a chill. "It might all be a waste. That's it. That's all I'm saying." He offered a clever smile like he was imparting advice to save me. Maybe he was.

I stared into my laptop without blinking. All those words, they turned to fuzz. But I maintained, pretended I hadn't heard a word. After a few long certain minutes, he turned himself slowly, traipsed back down the hallway, ta-tic, ta-tic, ta-tic, nuzzling the door open. "Toodles darling! I may be back..." I heard him sing-song as he trailed away.

"Yes, I'm sure you will."

Now I'm left to wonder if what he said was true. Almost surely - it is. But why he always comes to me, I don't know. To convince me, probably. Maybe to convince himself.

I blinked again. The fuzz returned my words. If only he knew the private joy of releasing them. So I picked up at the point where I had been interrupted and resumed writing, for the rest of us.

Where Have I Seen Her Before?

She blind-sided me while I was still in sleepy disarray. She, a mirror morning reflection wearing mismatched pajamas (if an old high school track t-shirt, last year's maternity pants and black socks even qualify as that. "Pajamas" are quite the broad species - Victoria's Secret silky numbers despise their taxonomical cross-contamination with this sort of sad get-up). On her head, a mop of bad highlights that looked something between a half side-ponytail and half ear toupee. Her rough hair hadn't felt a smooth bristle since Sunday. It doesn't help that somehow every hair brush in the house somehow frolics away to that same vanishing world where left socks, barrettes, and scotch tape conspire their pranks (scotch tape to missing item friends: "Did you see that look on her face while she was tearing the whole house apart?! Classic. Oh my god (elbowing left sock) - Look now! She's trying to use blue tack on that present! She's running late! She's sweating a lot! What a trainwreck!") That was yesterday.

At 7:19 this morning, Tuesday wasn't looking any better. Like the camera adds 10 pounds, maybe the mirror adds 10 - I don't know - weird things. Like a big ole age spot. Eyebrow wrinkles. Toothpaste on her shirt collar from the night before. So I stopped for a moment, catching a flicker of something familiar in the mirror. A strange wave came over me, as if I had seen this funny 30s woman, somewhere, once before.

I remember my mom when I was little girl, 7 or 8 maybe, scuffling down the stairs in the cold bone-break of morning - grey crew socks, furry shoe slippers - the ugliest kind, her pastel floral robe hanging about her, a giant drape straight from the curtain rod, tied around her waist like a too big kimono gone wrong. Her hair was boy-cut short, but it still found a wiry way to look like it needed help, and bad. She'd wake my brother and I up: "time to get up, time to get ready for school." And I'd follow her down, Brian behind me, and the three of us would cycle through our morning routine to prepare for another big day of school. After she'd scavenge the cupboards, rearranging everything, she'd find the box, and as soon as she had served my brother and I our delicious bowls of instant oatmeal, she'd scuffle back upstairs to get dressed. As soon as she'd hit stair 3, I'd stand up - bowl and spoon ready - and scurry over to the sink like a quick little mouse to scrape the thick stuff down the garbage disposal. To my credit, I did try it once. I immediately felt like I was choking on a hunk of barbed wire covered in, I guess, oatmeal. So I promised my throat and watery eyeballs: "Never again."

Once the goop was safely deposited in its proper place, I'd scamper back across the kitchen floor to my seat with the empty bowl and spoon (alibi: "mmm, I just gobbled it up it was so good mom!"), arms folded in front of me, a sure smirk on my face. ("Cha-ching! I did it again! Life's a thrill! I just threw perfectly good food down the sink and didn't get caught!") After a while, I was like a strolling bank robber on my tenth heist - over-confident, sloppy. I'd start to get up as soon as she turned her back, oatmeal down the drain before she hit stair 2. And always, I sat across from my big brother, a pleasant look of satisfaction on my face and without a bite of breakfast in front of me (I've always destested breakfast foods, for the most part. Belgium waffles and bacon are my exceptions - though, not together) while he, oh Brian - well he'd shake his obedient head in disagreement, eyes glued to his oatmeal in firm refusal to corroborate. Oh Brian. A loyal dog always accepting what was given to him. To this day, I still love this gracious quality about my brother.

After my breakfast crime, I'd run upstairs and quickly get dressed so I could head towards the bathroom to brush my teeth and then stand in the doorway to watch my mom finish getting ready. I'd ask her a question that was eerily similar to the one I had asked her the day before, and the day before that, and -- "What are you doing, Mom?" She would be slapping on blush in a frenzy before we headed out the door. "Putting on my makeup" she'd answer quickly (almost like she was expecting the question. Go figure). Then came my existentialism. "Why?" "To give my cheeks some color" she'd say, sucking in like a fish, rolling the big fluffy brush along her cheekbones, once, twice, three times each. Then on her forehead. Then her eyelids. A few strokes on her neck. And last, along her thin chin line, like a V.

I was adopted when I was two. Me - Korean, heart-shaped face, long thick black hair, thin eyes, big cheeks. My mom - white, a long-face, thin everywhere, short fine brown hair (sometimes it was reddish, other times frosted), pale blue eyes, skinny cheeks. You can assume with confidence that I've never looked anything like my mom. Ever. That includes our chins. I was always jealous of my mom's thin chin. And her scrawny arms. I would pass on her long fingers and flat butt, but her arms and her chin I'd take happily.

When she was finished rubbing blush on everything except her ears, she'd throw the brush into the drawer, whack it closed with her hip like she suddenly remembered we needed to be somewhere, and she'd hurry us along, her hands on my shoulders, steering me like a car - out of the bathroom doorway, down the stairs, out the door, back through the door, "get your lunch Stacey!", out the door again, to the bus stop. On our walk down the block in the brisk fall air, I'd inspect her, curious, like a science project. I'd think to myself: "Wow, she looks pretty...pink. Pretty too. But pink."

Like a distant memory - the foggy kind - I recall that I once made a silent self-declaration - "When I get big, and old, like a mom, I am not going to wear grey socks, or terrible slippers (my mom to me: "so what! they're comfortable and when you get to be my age you don't care what they look like") and I will wake up early enough to apply my makeup carefully, with a little more grace, a little more va-voom!" In a similar proclamation, I went through a phase during middle school when I felt absolutely certain that as soon as I tasted the sweet freedom of adulthood, I would rotate between McDonalds and Taco Bell for every meal, including breakfast (Taco Bell for breakfast, of course, since I don't like breakfast food). Why not, I figured. My mom won't be around to veto. She'd say assuredly as she chopped a big floral arrangement of vegetables at the kitchen sink: "Nope, honey, not tonight. Fast food's okay once in a while, but there's nothing like a home-cooked meal." Well, what did she know anyway, right? She was just my mom. She didn't know me! She didn't own me! Or my thoughts! Or my dreams. I knew what I wanted, who I wanted to be! What I wanted to do! These days, I look in my empty fridge and wonder how my mom got all those delicious dinners to magically appear. One day I'll have to ask her.

So, at 7:19 this morning, she looked at me, reflected back towards me, standing in my sad excuse for pajamas, from somewhere like a distant morning past. And in that blind-sided mirror moment, disheveled, running late, makeup-less, one unpacked lunch waiting for me in the kitchen, one kid shouting for oatmeal (my mini-me daughter, well - all except for that) and the other smaller kid - for a sucker, I stood, staring at her from head to toe. And I just laughed. Loudly. Because it hit me - I looked about as old as I remembered my mother looked young, back in those bathroom doorway days when motherhood was synonymous with dry hands and unfashionable clothes. And wouldn't you know that in that moment, for the first time in my life, and hers as well, I was beginning to look just like my mother.

How's your novel coming along?

I asked her.

She shot a smile. "Well."

"Well," I said.

"Procrastination

never looked so poetic."

To William Carlos Williams

so what depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed in rain
water

beside the white
chickens?

I Can Be a Mother Poem

I can be a mother poem.
Afixed tentacles to dripping life
Off countertops.
From teardrop eyes.
Pain that does not know tomorrow.
Only tiny sadness
Without me.
A mother poem.

They sing me into song.
Roll me off a new day's tongue.
"I will" never talked so funny.
Twisted in drawl when he's never been south.
And she, she painted her ocean

Deep sparkly purple because she said
It matched my eyes.
I cried because her eyes match mine
And all that swims below.

She swam away. Turned blank sky orange.
Ran right back to show me
Her color invention.
A poem of this world that did not exist
Until she did.

They fit me into their every sensory world.
Tell me, "Teach."
Ask me, "Stay."
Sometimes I cry, "I can't."
They laugh and don't believe me.

They write my lines with their feet.
Courage with their hands.
Inside their mittens, warm and winter.
So very, very small.
They cling, hang, wrap, and sleep
Daytime dreams and nightlight slumber
To the beat, beat, beat of this
Mother poem.

Her Autumn Season

Old autumn sways inside her cool wool sky. Her branches cross. Fiddle like fingerprints circling their blessings. They know how to root a heart in place.

Through her eyes brown driftwood appear like two kind pieces, floating by, barely remembering their miles or the trunk which grew them.

But she is filled of old sweet bones, memories seeping like sugar maple sap: every quiet held sunrise, when she rocked sound back to sleep, year after year, against the softening cotton of her nightgown. Plumes of old familiar recipes lifted out with hot oven mittens around a family of hands: reaching, working, taking, giving back. Cupboard winters lined with glass garden rows in a dark cement basement. Every season - lengthening. Yet, every season - enough. Because she told them so.

Hope is always greater than loss. Life sounds like laughter and looks like prayer. This she reminded them, humming her wisdom. Dancing her mistakes.

Summer driveways beneath a dusk blanket. Awaiting the engine switch of life departing. Then another, then another. Her long porch listened deeply for a day's return. She knew the good ones always come back. And did they ever.

She laughed wildly, lived preciously. Made them each a life of matter with her bare knuckles and compassion. Tied so many shoestrings of love together that they buried themselves under her, came up breathlessly to try and love the same. When they couldn't, she loved them greater. So they would remember how.

They watched as her faith created patterns of circles inside their generations. Her smile was an everyday reminder that she did not live to prove it.

Her driftwood eyes float over and over, like seasons. October breezes scatter her across a thin riverbank. Still, her old sweet bones. They hold much more than her autumn expression. They have been carving her own way back. Into a thick trunk, to its deep roots. Into every changing leaf, falling. Into every last leaf to come.

Ode to the Apple

There's no doubt that living breathing legends exit the earth the same way the rest of us do. Some, painfully, some painlessly. Perhaps what is left unsaid, greater than what is left undone, becomes the more painful element of loss, for the one who is going and for the ones who remain, because we're remarkably aware that saying something actually costs us nothing - except, perhaps, a swallow of our pride, a bit of forgiveness, one long fell swoop of acceptance, maybe; and in that case, no one can ever quite be sure what muddles below on either side of life's coin except those left holding their tongues. I don't know. I don't have enough experience with loss to know much about anything, really.

But there's something strangely affective about Steve Jobs' death. Maybe it's because the artifacts of his life's contributions blink alive vibrantly, metamorphically, inside our pockets, inside our strung together world, inside our habits. There's literally a physical connection a billion people have around the world to a man's inner genius. Granted, great people die everyday; most of us have no close personal affection to the late Tocqueville, or Edison, or King, despite the dents they too made on the universe. And maybe the lesson of Jobs' death is of no greater value than anyone else's. Thinking of an angel like Mattie Stepanek, a messenger of God's love, and then thinking of Steve Jobs, I wonder - maybe less of life is about how many people we reach and more of it is about how deeply we reach just a few. The judgment isn't ours to make, either way. But undeniably, every messenger needs a medium; Jobs built us a few pretty damn good ones. Yet, we cannot quite commemorate the death of someone who built an unmatched empire of innovation with a missing pillar of philanthropy and believe that the worth of his life means more than that of the man, and woman, and child who passed away the very second after he did.

Still, I find it's just too stirring a moment to not reflect upon - to watch possibility die and live at the very same time. One man does not stop the world; the world does not stop for one man. No matter how powerful, rich, bad, good, or transformative. We're each just a blink of God's eyelashes. Ideas will flower, change will come, innovation will burst through the seams of our world, for good and awful, and by faith, neighborhood, and humanity, people will persist and resist the nature of history - that it is both controlled by us and controlled by no one. It is the complex, simple design of God no one has figured out. And definitely, not by Steve Jobs, or else he would have controlled his fate, I can assume, for a little while longer.

This is just a rambling, really, to maybe arrive at the emotive estimation that we cannot all have the same impact on the world like Jobs did. But in terms of making a dent on the future universe, I think it causes me to pause, longer, to redefine where my universe is, and who lives in it. What needs to be done, what needs to be said? Undoubtedly, we all have something more to say, so, what is it? Maybe I think of Jobs as one of those unbridled folk who said what he needed to say, and loud enough for the outer limits of his own small part of the universe to hear him. From a distant ariel view, you could say we all just get one long day, one fat chance, to do just that. Jobs was 56, Mattie was 13, I am 30, so I guess not being able to find the time or overcome the fear are just terribly lazy excuses for not living like we're going to die at some moment between now and then.

In my recent unpredictable oddities, I wrote a short jingle for Apple on my way to Mystic, CT (seriously, who thought I'd accidentally join the ranks of Uncle Jesse/Uncle Joey). Maybe it's because we had just been given an iPad, our first Apple device, a few days prior, and maybe the funny joy I felt for owning a small piece of the spectacle made me do it. Maybe because those dang catchy tunes of theirs stick the roof of our daily hum like peanut butter, so I thought maybe I'd try humming my own, and then, teaching it to my kids so I could hear the funny sound of someone singing your song. I don't really know, but anyways, I think it's only appropriate to throw it out into the universe, because, why the hell not.


Ode to the Apple

Circle your dancing finger with mine
'round the world seven times c'mon and play
Shout to the clouds "Open up the orange sky
the day ain't done there's something more we want to say"

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, LOVE

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
We all got something more to say

Peel back our wings we're all kind of strange things
Who fly and try the hocus pocus of our dreams
You might float there and I may be here
But we'll find each other somewhere in the air

Then say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey
Love love love
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, LOVE

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
We all got something more to say
We all got something more to say.

photograph

A timeless beckoning to
abandon all this for a while.
Follow its faint glow and come -
live inside, here, with our eyelashes
stopped.

The matter of before and after
press no hard weight on this
a delicate specimen
its breath spliced from air and a moment.

Yes, come to this discrete in-between
pausing what is before it nearly never happened.
Gold fleck of wing turned inside out.
A firefly struck fleeing, flashing its small life inside the dark.
There - and there - and there.

Intricacy distilled from gravel night
by itself in a dusty container punctured, pixelated
just in case. Just in case.

Maybe it will under this curious lamp, here.
Our two eyes twist open, cup remnants of life, gently.
We press our funny hope inside to feel
fire come alive.
Fluttering shadows bring: joy, tears, love, forgiveness.

And we discover after all this still time
its original wonder yearning
through holes and years
to be kept again. And again, and again.
Even, there. Whoever that may be.

Tiny flicker of fortune.
A firefly never flees from what it knows:
to be held it must be captured.

A micro philosophy on self-knowing

For a great most of us who occupy a small space of this world at one time or another, we justify it wholly acceptable yet restlessly unsatisfying to continue living just as we do. At least, this is a valid question of self-meaning that emerges at some bold moment during our lives, and for some, throughout our lives. This is because we, at least I, have lived a life of half-intentions, unrequited dreams and part-way glances, meeting the selves of others halfway and my self nearly not at all, at least, the deep parts of me that matter. We find discomfort in too long gazes and too short looks but stare just enough into others to run a mental algorithm, after a few exchanges, or even fewer encounters, to decide where on the value scale they fall in reference to our own, or to our family's, or to our morality's, and so forth. And therefore, treat them as such, as though appearance, preclusion of traits, occupation, accent, inherited wealth, or poverty, or all other habits of things that become formulations of value to us; we offer our own selves capable in that instance to determine what comparative relation we have with them, and they to us, which of our vectors align, or intersect, or run opposite, at least the ones we care to measure and discriminate, and that this becomes the conditional nature of how our human relationships take form. Or never do.

The in-between of too short and too long is a mechanical protective narration we follow; to never fully stay too long or go too deep for fear of what will be revealed. We find impermeable unchallenge to the habit of socially constructed human transaction - to manage superflous introductions or conversations as a polite follow-up to our pre-determinations, or in hopes that the person will do something, say something, that leans them more favorably to our judgment, and as well, leans us towards theirs. It is difficult for any one of us to just be, and this I think is true for some if not most. But not for all, however, because there are those rare humble earthstones who deliver only what they have to offer, typically a small open box with not much inside. They arrive on the doorstep of every conversation saying,"Hey, it's all free, and I don't mind if you don't take a thing." Many more of us claim this category than who should. In fact, the paradox of humility almost prevents such knowing.

That we may never completely know if others say what they mean or do as they believe, if their beliefs are deeply rooted or an accident of erosion; we do not know, but in any case, we find easily our gavel of judgment. We know about this judgment thing well, very well, in fact, because we are secretly guilty of the exact incrimination we graft upon the world.

Greater than the laws of science and experiment, it is necessary to place ourselves under the microscope of our own barrage of questions to carve a meticulous form of self-fact from the rigorous exercises of deduction and discovery and devices of all things inward. This is a type of necessary absolution, that is, to meet our eye with as much whole courage as we have wholly lacked, and finds no respite invitation in our social discourse, because eh, yes, the discourse means we talk less about each other and only of ourselves. What an awful, obscene proposition; to require those of us who hover stealth opinions about everything unrelated to our own deep selves to produce a handful of self-facts and some genuine vulnerability to prove it. Many of us have no ill intention by it; others, yes, but ill intended or not, the unknowing is quite the same.

For this I have no answers. Why is it that we are unafraid to wield analysis to all outer extremities - of governance, of community, of enemies, of lovers, and friends, and even complete strangers, of which we have exact and often extreme opinions. But to the facts of ourselves, we find we have very few, and even of those we would rather not be tested. Why is this? Why are we so afraid to know better the only inner creature we are given, to become more than merely acquainted with ourselves, to offer that peculiar stranger within more than small conversation during infrequent quiet moments, or retort with continuous doubt at her attempts of expression. This is what I do not understand, either of myself or of anyone guilty of the same charge. That is, we misuse the same incomplete application of algorithm against our self as we do against others, and by consequence, our self-knowing joins the army of our inaccuracy that predominates how we understand and participate in this world; indeed, not as wildly and fully as we should.

The entire lesson is God; He does not give the lesson but rather is The Lesson. This I believe. I also believe God plants seeds of wisdom where we can reach them, and perhaps, with which to feed our souls. One simple lesson, then, might arise as wisdom from the infant generation. This is the distinctive charm of children: they find no fear or haste in staring into us for long periods of time - listening, observing, absorbing the ordinary magic we have to offer. Children make us feel magical - they beckon to the surface those childish qualities of ours, and emerging with their permission are those parts of us that are unpolished and unfascinating and nonsensical; the parts of us that wish had a place in this world to belong. Perhaps we must, as they do, ask simpler questions and accept simpler answers. Of ourselves and of each other. We may find that we have far fewer answers than we claim to know, about others and the world, and of course, about ourselves. We may find fluidity in our self nature. Within this fluidity is time, space, courage, and openness to learn new things without feeling threatened or chained to something former or too stubborn to become something untried. Outside of this fluidity is where we, satisfied or not, reside. Children, thankfully, live inside this fluidity. Children accept. They emit joy when it's in them, they listen, or they don't listen and ask another question, then another, and yet another; they cry when they must and dance when their hearts sing; they move, they do not dwell. And in that freedom lives their natural forgiveness of all things, and their inability to judge us because - they have not yet learned what it is to judge themselves, as least not yet.

Therein is the absolution, the magical overture, of how we may lay aside the complicated persona and simply become the person.

Life Observation # 5

One privilege of privilege is bitching about it.

My Problem

I have no problem with
self-condemnation, except
how often I have to hear it.

Brilliant!

"Not I said the fly."
"Not I said the fly."

How ridiculously stupid is that.
I could have written the same folksy forays

little jiggity jigs making

millions of children laugh
the whole world over
through the decades.

Although,
I tried to delight
just two today and

failed miserably.
Neither one of them laughing
nor I, for that matter.

So I settled with

"Not I said the fly."
"Not I said the fly."

Then laughed hysterically
at the satire.

who opens a dictionary

plain words are too close a symbol to
a feeling we aren't sure
we want to say

yet

or just
in that way

so we strip it and
redress it in

faster
language

full of art

less
defined

we use:

unclear
after
ambiguous

word

stretch--

example
after
example

like,
this here,
for example,

expecting only

one-fifth an ear
four-fifths a nod

to our
cogent repertoire
that inflicts
at most--

a short grimace, hmm
- cogent,

of lazy uncertainty

because,

who opens a dictionary
cross-checks a thesaurus
or questions anything
while being lectured by
metaphors

since

halfway to three minutes
seven minutes entirely she has lost her

first meaning anyway

Returning to the Mystic

It was back in late February when the last tiny islands of ice were still dancing on the Mystic that the old man first returned to face the river. From Jeremiah’s sidewalk view above, he looked like a loon, hunched in a thick worn coat and brown knit hat. Jeremiah watched as the old man buckled downward, clawed a single rock from the earth and then raised it, mechanically, to within an inch of his eyes. Across its face he ran his arthritic fingers, over and over, until finally, he threw it into the blank waters. For eight months, this became the harmless spectacle Jeremiah would pass by on his morning walk to the Sullivan T-station, three stops from the glossy teak desk he’d break from at nine, sometimes 10 o'clock at night. He performed logarithmic magic for a downtown Boston marketing firm, creating for it, and for himself, quite a pile of profit. He was only 29, but the heavy crystals of his watch, the quick-easy of his walk, indicated that he had outpaced even his own expectations.

Every morning before eight, the man would be there, collecting pebbles and drowning them in the river. Jeremiah didn’t know where he appeared from, or at what hour he left, because always, the riverbank was empty by the time his dress shoes met moonlight on his dark walk home.

But on this autumn morning, the sun rose colder. In his grey suit--his darkest one--Jeremiah headed out early, not to his teak desk, but to the airport. He hadn’t seen Uncle Sal in eight years. But by lunchtime, he would hover over him, breathless, his two thick familiar hands across his chest that would be holding only themselves. There were two reasons why Jeremiah would go home. After today, there would be just one.

On his way to the airport, inside the rusted loneliness of the Sullivan station, he heard the morning's first inbound train screeching, stopping. The doors creaked open, two footsteps echoed faintly. Jeremiah raised his eyes, and there he hobbled: the old man with nothing in his hands but time. Suddenly, Jeremiah’s throat burned as he met his pale eyes – their sagging kindness, the two long crow’s feet that ran from them as if he had spent most of his years wincing in pain.

Pausing, he waited for Jeremiah’s question. But after a long silence, the old man turned towards the stairs that would once again bring him closer to – the rocks. Those beautiful rocks, each one a memory of Mr. Eddy, the man who almost became his father. He, who, for one long season, freed him for hours before the orphanage lights shut off and brought him, a young boy, to the calm banks of the Mystic. Mr. Eddy taught him how rocks were the hard seeds of life and how holding just the right one could turn him smooth. Look, he’d say, picking one up from the shore. Pounded in here is the weight of a thousand stories you can only feel inside your fingers. Go on, now, hold one. It’ll tell you where it’s been. So he took it from his hands, felt the rough grooves of its stories, then asked it silently to lead him home. Once, he picked up a rock, opened his pocket to put it in. But Mr. Eddy put a gentle hand on his shoulder, and with his other pointed somewhere beyond and said: Don't forget to throw it back in the river, son, because the earth only cuts what the waters will heal.

When the next train arrived, Jeremiah stepped inside, alone. And as the doors closed to take him on a journey between two far places, he felt the shape of the question aching in his palms and the longing in the old man’s eyes. There were a quarter million reasons to come back to this place, but now only one would return him to the banks of these waiting waters.

The Cat and the Paper Girl

There once was a girl made of paper. She wrote all of her tiny dreams inside, then folded herself, over and over, until she looked just like a bird.

A cat strolling by noticed her. He was about to eat her for breakfast when, strangely, something changed his mind. So he began, instead, to unfold her. First by her wings, then by what little was left.

That is when the cat realized that she was not a bird but in fact, a paper girl.

Looking over what covered her inside, the cat stood, puzzled. "Why have you scribbled all over yourself?"

"Because there was no place else for me to write," said the girl.

"Oh, I see," said the cat. But he did not, really.

"And why did you fold yourself into a bird?" asked the cat. "I nearly ate you alive, you know."

"Yes, that is the dream I wrote about here," said the girl quietly, pointing to her heart.

"What!" cried the cat. "To be eaten?"

"No," she whispered. "To be noticed."

From then on, the cat never ate another bird, because they reminded him too much of the paper girl who risked her life dreaming to be noticed.

Dear People: Please Use Your Imagination

176 days ago - Rueters. "8000
massacred in Libyan rebel uprising."

25 days ago - PBS. "30
Americans killed in Chinook helicopter crash."

4 days ago - CNN. "35
killed in series of attacks across Iraq."

Today. "I
reached inside a drawer and sliced my finger across thin paper.
It took a short moment for the long crease to well
blood but when it did, thick red dripped down the white wood drawer."

Yes I understand but -
it's just a drawer.

Robert McNamara calls this the "Fog of War" and -
I believe him.

We say a million times
"I can't even imagine," yet -

You just did.

S is for Story

Addy and I were reading a book tonight called "A is for Africa" and when we turned to the Q page there was a young woman, sitting tall, wrapped in what looked like a large black and yellow and red striped blanket, a black turban wrapped upon her head and heavy red shell beads around her neck, the kind you might find these days hanging at an H&M jewelry aisle for $22. And she was barefoot, ten toes covered in red silt earth.

"She doesn't have glass slippers, does she?" I asked. Addy shook her head no. "See, queens and princesses come in all different kinds of colors and shapes and wear all different things."

Thinking, she said finally, "But do you think she's not as beautiful?" I was struck for a moment. I could feel the molding weight of my daughter's perception of beauty slipping in like a breeze through her night window.

"Look at her eyes. Do you see? She is telling us a thousand beautiful stories with her eyes. That is where beauty lies. We can see beauty when we look into someone's eyes and hear the stories they are trying to tell us." Addy looked at the woman on the page, the soft mystery in her gaze, a dark dove from a far away land. And then, she looked up at me. I saw her piecing my words together. In a strange way, between her and I, silence has become our tacit language of understanding, that the long pause between thoughts is itself a thought, light wings landing if given enough space.

She looked at me one more time before I turned the page to R to see that I hold in my eyes enough stories to fill a thousand bedtime nights.

After we finished the book, I kissed her goodnight and turned off the light, and against her open window I tried to trace the lingering shadow of the cool breeze into my memory. Remember, I told myself - look into her eyes every day and ask her to tell you all the beautiful stories you see in her, because it is what we see in others that they will see in themselves.

Tonight, that is what my daughter told me like a story in her eyes.

That Heartbeat Thing

Our hearts pump miracle life laps every single second
Without us pausing once to wonder how it even happens
That happening of being...you know...alive
That glinting, just once in forever time span we're given called life
That thing we break up into days and awkward grades and stages
That ongoing everyday book of ours where we rip out whole pages
That tend to cameo in later chapters as our excuses or sages

Yes, life -
That heartbeat thing we're just trying to get through today
So by this time tomorrow we'll be 24 hours further away
From yesterday's sorrow
Or 24 hours closer to
who we're trying too hard to be
Or to how we ought to live or
to that damn epiphany -
When's it gonna happen?

Our heart beating arteries bleeding cell seeping
cardio-pulmonary system is so bleeping amazing, literally
Inexplicably amazing
But we don't think about how many things in our life are
so amazing that we can't even begin to explain them
So we answer all the easy questions then complain how much we hate them
I mean, really, I don't know about you but I'm complaining all the time
Like drinking a glass of clean clear water is not a gift but just my right
Like everything else I have or own or
every person whose personhood has intersected with mine
Well it's all just luck or coincidence and not at all divine, right?
Do I really have too much pride to admit how little control I have over my life?
How much more control do you have over the sea as I have to stop my heart from
Living in spite of me?
I mean, isn't that how I'm living my life?
Feet dragging head sagging task list nagging one day I'll catch my breath
But something inside is pounding loudly at the door of my regret
Because it knows every second catches me and begs me to live in it
Not with guilt or shame or pride
But with love spilling out from the torn flesh of
His side.

What can we expect to know about our destiny,
What can we realistically expect to control
When the biophysical operation of our basic flesh and bones
Is a completely mezmerizing God run circus
Of blood and veins and muscles and nerves?

Why is it that God allows us to completely unrecognize Him
For the every moment miracle of our involuntary wiring?
Why does He allow us to, at any given second
slouch with an unwillingness to find anything beautiful or blessed
Or anything miraculous or good beneath our skin
where the Holy Spirit pumps blood of Christ to refill us from within?

Maybe it's just that He gave us our cardiovascular design
as a masterful correlate to our sin
Then gives us an average of 78 humble reminders per minute
To remember that we can't even provide the simplest answer
To how we just breathed our last breath in.

Footsteps Changing

You are never the same when the footprint of a city steps into you, or you upon it. Whether you know it or like it is beside the point. Experience reaches through the invisible you and grabs you for as long as you'll stay and always gives a little something too; unfamiliar Atlantic air and glimpses into hard working bootstrap sidewalk city life and walking trails through history and centuries gone by and East coast corner Brazilian pastry shops when you didn't know a week ago that Brazilians lived in Boston or even what they ate, let alone - puff pastries. Experience happens whether you expect it or not.

Every person, like every city and pastry shop, is her own corner of the universe - a sole mecca surviving only because of the lives that inhabit her, who drop change into buckets or sit still long enough to notice the cracks - jagged lines of invitation to remember we are all strangers at some point, even to our children, even our parents to us, but life is carved into our backs and history? Well history is a stranger to no one; I can't remember the eyes of a woman mine met last week but history will never forget the dark creases of her name. Life exists before you came and will exist after you leave but history is never the same because you, absolutely, were alive, because you touched every corner you stumbled into and fumbled past, including - mine. That is what places and people whisper to each other, that we are flint and we are fire and change each others' compositions as our lives brush against each others', for a moment on the street or in a house for 15 years, but the flicker of what we speak aloud is quieter and less courageous than the sound our trailing footsteps leave behind as we exit a room down the escape route from our fears. From entire lives, even.

That is the invisible collision between us, that we stumble into and out of different lives and different times, across each others' borders and through apartment walls and city lines, and we can so easily forget the impressions we've made, or have been made upon us, and then we one day wake up thinking about yesterday's years and wonder what we did to pass the short days, how many doors we knocked on and who we opened ourselves up to or invited inside to stay. At some point it all seems incalculable. But really, it doesn't matter, the facts and figures that is, because we're each the shop and the customer, the city and the citizen, because we spend our days asking others to pay a premium for what we have to offer only to realize that all we have to offer is what others have given to us. Our feet take no steps without the ground; the ground makes no sound without our feet. That is the symbiotic nature of life happening as it sticks unnoticed to the soles of our own lack of appreciation as we pound our everydays into the streets.

That the sound of our life is really just the echo of the footsteps before us; that we cannot hear our own history because we move at the speed of life and change happens at the speed of sound and so often history is silent until long after it is made, and by that time we are moving full speed towards a new change, which means, perhaps - we ought to be thankful for cliffs of change before change falls into our lives just to believe in the fragility of the moment as it passes beneath us or passes us by, entirely. That every step we take upon the earth is a million lives deep. That, we don't have to know someone's name to know they are alive, to know somewhere their life matters to someone as much as mine..as much as mine matters to those who know me by my name.

My earth now is Somerville and this whole region and all these people I haven't met or do not know a thing about. The fascination is not in making a strange city my friend, or becoming fast friends with new strangers. It is that we do so everywhere we go, that without our knowledge or permission, we live amongst each other and together our history creates itself another layer of memory, around every corner - a new sidewalk of possibility. And if we sit still long enough, we can hear the footsteps echoing from a past we have yet to understand, our own footsteps from a future dream that we are already living.

That Blue Door on Cherokee

Maybe one autumn day Danny and I will be on a lazy drive down Route 66 through central Illinois and bend our retired curiosity toward exit 91 off Interstate 72 to revisit that blue door house on Cherokee we walked through for just shy of two years. We'll press our fingertips just barely against the window pane of that early 30s time in our lives when our kids were young and we were young and how we used that roof sometimes like an umbrella and other times like a canopy, and how we danced inside those living room walls and made serious life decisions in that basement. Those kinds of decisions that are funny to us, thinking back on them, because we will have learned by then that the only truly serious decisions we ever made in our lives were the ones when we decided together what really matters, and how anyway, those came easiest.

No matter how far we reach past this blue door, neither of us will be able to quite recall how we spent those last night hours in that house, or what all we stuffed into those boxes or threw into garbage bags beneath the twilight buzz of dim fluorescence. We won't remember which picture frames we took off the walls and wrapped like sacred gifts because at some point along the way, I won't know when, the pictures will be taken off some other wall of some other house and placed inside some other box, never to make it out. Sometimes funny things like that happen, and we don't miss any of those things because we've forgotten they are gone, or if we do long for one thing or another, it is only because we remember how much we miss the person wrapped around its memory.

So whether it is one far day or just tomorrow, driving away from this blue door, if we remember very little except that we lived in this house together, built our family and wondered where life would take us, I can say I won't mind which memories stay inside these walls or which frames get lost forever, so long as, by God's grace, what really matters drives away, back home, with me.

Handwriting

Writing is an interesting artifact, a friend of fact or enemy of denial; itself its own alibi. I found such an artifact today while packing - my first notebook from the beginning of this year. This watermarked worn 99 cent notebook gave itself bare as my mildest tenor of hope to approach empty lines with a nervous pen and say something true. As I began to write in January, I recognized the distance of my own handwriting.

Right now, amidst our life shaking itself upside down and into cardboard boxes, my mind has been categorizing thoughts into very long and largely useless itemized to-do lists - quite a dull spoon for the creative prime. So I've interchanged today's spoon with yesterday's knife.

I shyly dusted off this notebook and began to read, and in doing so I began to understand that we are never as far or as close to the past as we perceive; our distance from who we were or thoughts we once had is as far as the forgotten voice buried in a distant drawer or as near to our memory as the very last page. Especially when it speaks the solitude of our own hand, writing.

January 15, 2011
Layover in St. Louis
Back in the airport and it feels like coming back to an old familiar house - maybe not the one I grew up in but one I frequented often, enough to get a pitter-patter of excitement to visit, an uncertain smell, but a smell nonetheless, the abstract dark blue carpet pattern paving miles of airport walkways, as if it wants to be noticed but just can't be, a disguise of millions of footprints, travelers whose destination is not this place here, a medium of in-between. But the airport walls stand, glass and pleather seats, ready to be used, over and over again by strangers of short distances and long miles.

I feel in my bones a sense of connectedness to the disconnect, the detachment of wanting to be but being ignored, bad-looking flooring and garbage cans and overpriced commodities that have no earthly business costing quadruple their actual worth. But they all try to fit into the context, serve a purpose. A pointless t-shirt: "St. Louis Loves Me." Really? A city that doesn't know your voice, has never heard you cry or recognize that birthmark hidden beneath the nape of your neck; not one footprint on its river shore, a murmur of thought of its history - tensions racial enough to rip a hole in a child's American dream. Why would St. Louis love you? Ah, because you came, drank overpriced coffee, one sugar two creams on the steps of its outer windows, waiting to hitch your kite to the next ride out, far away and never back again. You can't even see the arch from your aerial hover. Not when you refuse to look any way but up, up, up to a heaven you wonder exists, falling closer to its cloudy wings than the ground below that holds you.

January 17, 2011
In Pittsburgh, 1:00pm
A good plain notebook is roomy, gives you the space of walking through an airport the wrong way with still enough room on either side of you for the oncoming travelers clamoring toward the footsteps you just left behind. I want to bulldoze, skate across, spin, spew, spit fire, take a big long metal detector to the hardened ground and find nothing below, throw rocks, chuck stones, lay down and roll away, feel the flat landscape, create foothills and mountains with their earth then sit amongst them and cry, laugh, dream with thoughts of them and get lost in their scent and imagine how I would feel if they were not there. You cannot do that without space that gives you permission to build.

January 18, 2011
I can't get enough, reading what I've written, wishing it could be enough. Reading Stephen King's "On Writing" and he demands 2000 words a day, prolific reading, and a no-less-than six days a week of writing, and that's only if you're a beginner. I already feel inadequate. When you see an unfocused dot that appears to be floating like a feather speck across a country river, you can follow it down with your eyes but can never get further than the rock bed. Maybe the dot I see are periods. Ends of sentences I can't finish. Winter seems buried in my lungs, and I can't cough it out.

So there's a girl I see in my head, maybe the one I'm trying to discover, she's got something to say. She's foul-mouthed and hilarious in certain honest moments. She lives beneath layers and sleeps with the truth but is awake with the mundane - smiles enough, laughs enough, exchanges pleasantries enough with just enough of the just right people. Her eyes stay above water, the rest of her - below. I don't know what she is capable of, what her motives are, or who she really is, but she's starting to nag.

Give Words Away

Every hour alive we spend with them,
the never shutting up friend
or at least since the crack, bump, fizz
when our infant synapses
sparked a billion miracle connections of language
our primal need for expression
the hour when one garbled sound began spinning
infinite galactic combinations
like an inner universe gone wild
the thinking creativity of a child
unique and innumerable as December snowstorms in Detroit. Detroit has worthy children and is worthy of snow, and worthy of this poem, and worthy of a home, you know. As worthy as the breath you just took from the air
don't let it stay there
take what you need then give it back as a word for someone else to hear.

But in any snowstorm in any place
no one snowflake tastes the same
because they fall from different mothers and encode different DNA
and each has a purpose and destination and cries out a different name. Yes, even yours.

Every hour we're alive we hear them
echoing in our silence or screaming or mulling
or concocting the next joke we want to crack, this is gonna be a good one
but we never get our chance
because the conversation we were about to enter has abruptly moved
stood us up and cut us off to another subject room. This one, darker.
So we deposit our uncashed joke for the next time
hoping we'll gain interest from the punchline
but we'll never get to deliver it out loud
because never in our lives will we come across the same lewd inappropriate crowd
ever again. Sometimes,
you know when you've missed your chance and you promise yourself to never miss it again, but the chance won't come
Because the person is gone or
the timings all wrong
or what you should have written has instead written you
the mappings of a different life
and what you shoulda said is where you never arrived.
at least, not yet.

We spend every in between space filled by them
they, dragging us to the cliffs of our fears
and some push us to fall while others call us, running us back to the false safety of our locked and buried tomb
the one six feet below our confidence saying "you're too late" or "it's too soon"
or "stop" or "stay back" or "let it go" or every great once in a while encouraging us: "get back out there, it's just snow. Don't stay inside, hiding from your own two hands, just because you're trembling scared doesn't mean that you can't -- it's just snow keeping you from going exactly where you need to go, so, dig yourself out of this darkness and go. Just try."
Then after we tell ourselves "just try" we stop ourselves dead when we ask ourselves why.

Every hour we are filled by this:
the consciousness of our own running thoughts
running into our own running dreams
running into our doubts and into beliefs
these our smashing talk intersections of soft silhouette streams
and trickling what-if creeks and
contradictory rushing still rivers and
cliff jumping waterfalls powering steamboats of our Big Ideas
aortic engine poetry spinning verses into wheels and
treading self-condemnation and murky mental reservations
and brilliant flashes taking underwater pictures of absolutely nothing
and long shots of hope to recreate what we see, our mind's eye
into art or expressions of half-truths and whole lies
or whole truth half-disguised
as bad jokes or that moment of vulnerable exchange when we try with our eyes
or with our vulgarity or the silent shield of our pride
to coax others to reassure us "I understand what you mean" or "tell me more" or
"I had no idea you felt the same way" or "don't give up hope" or "just try." To hear the words: "just try" is what we chase after. We go such a long way for such a short answer.

Even right now you're comparing my words to the unstoppable judgment of your own, "she's an average poet," or "she's got a point" or even "I could have said it better had I known...that I could be a poet too" and even in your most sedated state of meditative mind
when you're in the seventh hour of your sixteen hour drive
to feel the air of a far place you've never seen or must return to because you saw it, years ago, in your dreams
or when you're in full swing conversation and different words spill from your lips than the ones bottled up in your self-talk head
when you say "sure I will!" but you're actually thinking "why am I saying yes?
just to avoid disapproval from her?"
while she who asks you says "okay, great!" even though she's thinking "sucka, I hooked you again!"

We are a living compilation
of unending unrecorded chatterbox music, staccato struck notes and pianissimo emotions
and here's the inescapable prize we each win
we get to listen to ourselves over and over and over again
talking ourselves into and out of our dreams and backwards and forwards from what we're trying to say even when we don't do what we know we can or don't say what we mean.

We get to listen to the voice saying go
telling us to open the heavy door and pick up today's snow
melt our costume like cold snowflakes on our tongue
face up to the sun
letting out what's in and letting down what's up and breaking through what our walls won't let us shut up or shout into breathless air
from way up there
something's calling your name, beckoning you to speak the music you write and express the punctuation in your brain because every thought ends with a question and every statement starts with a comma, every blank space has an answer and every answer rights a wrong or writes a book or finishes an argument or begins a debate or becomes a song
the one you sing to yourself at the top of your shower lungs when there's no one around or the one that lulls you to sleep when your whole world crashes down.

But here's what we must do. Each one of us. To listen to our soft streams, our trickling thoughts and our voice and our ideas
then give them an outlet to be expressed and shared
maybe just upon paper or sung into the air
or between spaces between backroom confession walls or inside the ear shot distance of a 2AM long distance phone call
to a lover, or a friend, or a daughter, or a father or to that person you never told
what they really mean to you
so you quick use every courageous muscle you can
before you talk yourself into missing your chance.

Let's do this. Speak what's inside out
to live as honestly as we think and share who we are
finding for ourselves a way around
from the depths of our buried inner tomb
keys from our heart to the thoughts locked in that room, you know the one

whether bursting with love or cowering with fear
if we listen closely enough we'll hear
our name being called
those snowflakes of our winter doubts
encouraging us from outside these walls,
saying, "Come out"
and saying,

"Just try."
Because what's within us will within remain
unless we speak ourselves out loud
and give our words away.

Speak For Yourself

I dreamt that I trudged on, reading the wrong book. Finally I asked it why it would not speak to me. It told me, "There comes a time when you must speak for yourself." Then I closed the book to write my own.

Now, You Know

I wrote.

Thinking for what felt like years, he said, "I don't get it."

"Ah," I agreed. "Now, you know how I feel."

Driftwood

i never met a
driftwood poem
i haven't seen.

how can you
straight brow numb clasp not break, just a little
when fibers float your eyes along

way, this way drift, tepid,
toward riverbank scenes moon drippings
crackling wilderness
moss mapped trails...
exhilarating risk, faint nature
hunting you in lonesome
scamper

cold
firelight, ash, quiet. smoke,
in a wet night.

one light log on a long river.

reflecting,

luring, places you've never been
through you
a million uncrawled poems

yet a word
is all you dream.

What Art Is

Art is knowing that there is more than what is there in front of you. A basic element, it is not an ability but a subtlety; not a course rope capturing the bull, but kicking ordinary dust in a morning parking lot and knowing that in a time and place you almost were, something was captured beneath you. You dig with art to find out what it is. And almost always, if you plunge deep enough, there is a hidden limb below. Whether it reaches for you or you reach for it - it is you who has been captured. And somehow, the person kicking away the afternoon dust is not the same person who kicked it that morning.

Art is the risk of self-immersion into dimensions of form, thought, light, and expression. Art is our inner shadow, that, no matter how still or forgotten, has light cast upon it from our deepest places. We breathe art even if its hem does not unravel until we are too old or it is too late to throw it on to canvas or clay or stage or photograph or paper. But if we are breathing, art is too. Art is never too late.

Art is the moment when we risk feeling stupid, when we dip even the smallest cup past our cool surface and bring scalding water to our lips, or our hands, or our bellies, and then describe in some outward way how it makes us feel. Art does not heal, it exposes, and the rest of life mends what is left broken or breaks what once was fixed. Pouring salt or sugar or bandages or just letting God's air mix with our blood to close what we cannot by ourselves heal - that is the rest of this life.

Art is not the miracle, it is our attempt to explain how it happened, or why it happened, or how a cup of coffee and a conversation can mean nothing one day and then everything the next.

Art is the broken megaphone whispering "I am not perfect" and inside its echo is you.

Art is not explained well. Not to us as adults, or when we were kids, or to our kids, or even to the elderly now who graph memories like Picasso as they talk to themselves and are never told, "That is art." That we can kick dust for those who cannot kick dust themselves yet find both them and us below - that is art. The lesser of art is telling them what you found; the greater of art is them discovering what you have said.

Art is the silence of looking out the window and noticing the world, then rising up to experience it.

Art is for the sideways, for the back of the school theater room or the kids who wear elementary splattered smocks and whose clay teacup always turned out so much better than mine. We learn fast and we learn early: "Art is not for me." So we go a long and different route. But at some point in our lives we turn enough sideways and highways and back alleyways ourselves that we notice a different kind of shadow following us, an inner kind that casts opposite from the laws we know, yet subtly we know - it is there. So we pick up a pen or a camera or an instrument, a thought or a chisel or a phone, and then try to explain what we mean.

From the Victim to the Viewers

Driving, I write lyrics into the air, steer beats into my wheels. Thinking about the hundreds of thousands of socially displaced pre-teens and teenagers who suffer silent punishment against the brutal peer and cultural measurement of what is acceptably normal, my heart breaks. Some are shunned at home, some are loved at home, but what has been tragically proven is that bullying can kill, and at the very least, torment.

While I was driving last Tuesday, railroad tracks chased after me in parallel desperation, waiting for me to CRASH into this mental intersection, this common crossroad where invisible kids everywhere, in every school, walk the same gravel steel train lines alone. And for many years, in many different ways, they ask us to help them. They ask us to save them, not just watch them, as they slowly, then suddenly, disappear.


take a grass blade
and slice straight down my spine
any way you cut me up I don't fit right, anywhere

walking gravel rusted steel train lines
walking gravel rusted steel train life

stone throw miles and thread bare broken wings
can't see a thing but two buried hands
that have forgotten how to reach you
with your back to me

don't know how to ask or beg you back my life
mute memory tells me lie and knife fight for my peace
to not die, in silence

bet you didn't know you're on my mind
bet you didn't know i'd need you to survive

could you spare a drink of your time, I'm burnt completely dry
deliver me Sunday mercy, here's your chance to save a life
or does your cross not cross mine

won't you get on the train
won't you get on the train
i'll forgive you all of your hate
if you'll forgive me mine
teach me how to ask, just this time

I know how far I am
I know how far I am from where you are
I'm closer than you think, I'm not too far, gone

walking gravel rusted steel train lines
I'm walking gravel rusted steel train life

Ode #2 to Jack Johnson: Weather Girl

Ain't nothing else for me to do but wait
Salty stormy pale moon rain ain't going away
Least not any time soon
Forecast calls gloom

Thousand beautiful spoons til one fork came along
Who went so right, who went so wrong
It's not all there, but it's not all gone

Remember those two turtles by the sea
You said they were just like you and me
You said, "Come live with me and be my shell
We'll live life full and live it well
Play by the sea, just you and me
I'll be your weather girl
Cause if we're together
No matter what falls from the sky I'll call for sun"

Ain't nothing else for me to do but wait
For you to call in a different fate
Forecast sun instead of rain
Bright noon love instead of pain

Let's change what could have been to what still could be
Change dry land back to our dreams
Won't you come out of your shell
I'll love you full and love you well

Come back and be
My weather girl
Play by the sea, just you and me

Life Observation #4

I observed life and it observed me back. strangely,
neither of us could discern the act from the audience,
or if what we saw was the finger of our own hypocrisy
pointing back at me.

Playing with Plastic

Yesterday, Joey's plastic train officially chugged itself out of life. Today, Addy's plastic talking dollhouse - drained. "It doesn't work, Mommy," Joey affirms, holding up a tiny vacuum cleaner that, for seven short days, plugged into its dollhouse outlet to make a four second whirring sound. The same one Joey makes on rainy afternoons when an airplane whizzes across his imagination.

I gave the house six new triple A tries last week. Today, all six officially failed the test of even mediocre sale price quality. On the other hand, Joey's Duracell's have charged and chugged for almost a year. What to do with these lifeless plastic patients scattered in my basement? Instinct nearly jumped me up, running to grab my surgical screwdriver and a fistful of those powercharged tubes from the closet stockpile, then race back downstairs and, with confident craftsmanship - unscrew, remove, replace, and rescrew talking, moving life back into my children's toy universe.

Instead, I felt a peculiar pause. Next, a draw towards my phone (our computer is with Danny in Chicago), and a blip of inspiration to write.

When Joey wants to play with his train set, we dump out over fifty various sized track, train, and accessory pieces. Between the three of us and Dude, we each entrust, more or less, the same unimpressive engineering capability. The only reason I wind up as architect is because my fingers have 30 years of dexterity built into them. Joey - two. Addy - nearly four. One day, at the vertex of generations, we will interchange abilities, and both of them will race ahead as I run, maybe speed walk in tears, behind. We can't catch those moving, transparent years of change, fastidious as we may try, when life suddenly glimmers in a place your memory doesn't remember. One day they won't remember needing me because they won't. At least, not to assemble a train track.

So after a tense twenty minute experiment of confused construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, I typically wind up searching desperately for just one more of those curvy pieces to connect that small, I-almost-got-it gap (usually found upstairs under the couch, shirking its duties with an assortment of other temporarily misplaced items).

Once I extract the final puzzle piece from its hiding place and snap it into the maze - whala! Joey can get at it. He will proceed to place the train on the track then will pick up a plastic lever that he can push or pull an inch either way, appointing himself pleasant dictator of the train's directional fate. Other than a few rearrangements of accessories (trees, railroad crossing signs, etc.), Joey remains idle, observing from the side as battery lungs puff Chinese plastic up and around and through - over, and over, and over again. The train moves. He sits. Writing now, I realize how strange it is to watch a child watch plastic play for him.

Addy is sitting on her knees, low to the ground, perfecting her tiny, colorful plastic dollhouse people. "They are having an outdoor party," she informs me quietly without looking up. I hadn't asked her a question. But she could feel me thinking behind her, mesmerized by her long attention and focus. Maybe she wanted to reassure me by her unprompted response that she was just fine, mom. That batteries whirring four seconds of sound would not affect her in the least. She was letting me know that I can fix something that feels "off" just by writing. She has an amazing gift of intuition, something she is teaching me to attune; the faint low sound of our mind creating thought only when we listen. So I do, writing what I know I should.

Our house is full of plastic. I know we will buy and continue, with true gratitude, to receive battery operated plastic toys. Big and small. Inexpensive to wildly exorbitant. I don't feel a tugging judgment of disdain against these toys or a need to replace them with sticks and rocks and various sized pasta. In fact, I find them almost comforting these days, visual reminders after we put the kids to bed, all four of us exhausted, that, yes indeed, we do have kids. Here's the mess to prove it. But what inspired me to write versus replacing all those dead batteries today is that I know how much life churns and bursts and stirs inside my children, inside of me. We have hands to move, legs to run and jump, voices to create boisterous sounds of chugging trains and whirring vacuums and every other noisy jarbled undecipherable expression of our imaginations that swings us from jungle vines and throws outdoor parties indoors. God gave us these gifts - our children, of course, and all that life sizzling within them, within ourselves. And while some days I feel drained and ready to flip my switch to off, it is God's blessings, namely, my love for my kids, their love for me, that teaches me just how irreplaceable they are, how irreplaceable today is.

Joey returns to me after wandering around in aimless agenda, still holding the tiny plastic vacuum. "Mommy, it doesn't work," he reminds me again. I ask him to hand it to me. I crouch down on the ground with him like a magician about to reveal her trick. Addy leaves her outdoor party, curious.

"Watch this kids."

Then, charging my own inner battery, the one I sometimes think is too tired to work, I start to make a loud funny whirring sound, creating fast moving little vacuum lines in the basement carpet. Laughing, I see their eyes light up. That sparkling little light of joy inside of them that flashes excitedly when they are reminded that they, too, have magical powers that can animate toys to life, fly planes with their imaginations, and make plastic vacuums come alive the very moment they do.

Then I know. Here Jesus is - our spiritual charger - inside my basement, inside my words - His grace recharging me, recharging us all with the one irreplaceable, unending, unfailing power source - His love. It is what moves us, lifts us, charges us, and provides us with all that we are and all that we have. And in unexpected and sometimes funny ways, by His love He performs everyday miracles, great and small.

Today's miracle? He stopped me to play, paused me to write, then used lifeless plastic toys to move me.

light moving

Quiet early morning joy.
Trees dancing in shadow walls
Against music, feather drums.
Mothers nourishing the nature of uncertainty
Nested only to fly away and try
Floating, maybe
To mornings elsewhere.

They rise and grow thick with time
Then bow to fragile memories
Swaying long casted hymns like
Barely remembered voices
Branching shadows of yesterday.
Though always, light arrives
Dancing the earth and hesitant wings
Into this moment from its last.

The Other Side of This

God has fit together pieces, not golden edges or sharp
Puzzling as they may be
But gives us access, inner wells, into which our hearts sink
Still further to soul wells, God's springs,
Fountain of all that is Love, compassionate Love
Highest gratitude to Him.

Lord who walks us through those, our wells
Creates forms of faith, seen and unseen
Walks us upon His waters seeped through us
Rising us from bottoms of faithlessness to belief.
Hopelessness to relief.
Unworthiness to worth of being.

And when we walk, collecting forms of His pieces
Into our hearts, deeper into our souls,
He commands us to go further deep
However light, however dark
Trusting always with Him be
To the other side of this.

I walked tonight to the other side, listening
His courage my knowledge informed,
To realize at once, my soul springs entwine endlessly
To hearts about me, seen and unseen.

He, our One Fountain flowing through us all
Pours waters into our empty cup
And overflowing from what we choose to give
- even the last drop we've saved till dry,
Spills to fill another's emptiness up.

I am told we are pieces of each others' wholeness.
Without faith -
Meshed humanity unreached
God's love and our love for each other
Fabric of my soul tied to your heart -
Remain broken unfound pieces.

We cannot find our piece
Without believing our piece.

We cannot share our piece
Without being our piece.

That I cannot teach the faith that I know
Only live faith in Him and show
Others the love He has for me
And how mercifully He does giveth
Is His inner revelation to my whole world
- that I must with compassion and forgiveness
Give away each small piece of my small soul
To all those who live in it.

natural night-time sedative

Sometimes, midnight poetry isn't obsessed or dreamy,
alive and screaming.
It's not all worked up, street fistacuffs and bleeding
despondent and needy, heavy or heaving.

Some nights, midnight poetry is just flat bored,
and sleepy.

Unoriginal

I cut the sleeves and made it fit.
"This is a Recycled Idea."
Descartes shuffled past me,
recognizing his t-shirt.
I could tell, so I told him:
"Get your own, this one is mine."

Confessions of a Deadbeat Poet

To all my children I've abandoned all these tortuously separated years.
I say, please give me a second chance.
I am sorry for not being the kind of Mummy and poet I wish I could have been.
Every single one of you I've generalized and summarized and so sorely missed and mis-analyzed since
I bore you from school desked stapled syllabi and into my life's alibi:
6th grade: Rynd
7th grade: Steinbeck
8th grade: Bradbury
9th grade: Hemmingway
10th grade: Plato
11th grade: Plath and Vonnegut
and 12th grade well Mummy was too busy being Ms. Valedictorian A.P. World Lit on a 12-mile bus trip to another school district because my brilliance wasn't contained in the unmasterful curricular map of Allen Park High School Go Jags even though I just recently attended my first spoken word mic night in over 5 years and someone mentioned "parody" and I chuckled in the air like I was going to snap my deep literary fingers braised against themselves in beauty when really, I didn't know a damn thing being said or the poet who was being read (Poe) or which part of it I was supposed to tap the table on and when to nod my head ...instead I was just immune to the highly inaccessible irony that was being shared in head shaking eyebrow glancing tight-lipped commune between every poet writer lover reader in the room even though I diseased myself with false imitation just so I wasn't the one grossly literary-anemic sickle celled mutation just sitting there going "what's a parody again?"

And to you all, my children's loving foster parents, I know what I may look like. Yes, I may be the charming yet absent for their whole life mother slouched in the back at their wedding the drunk and uninvited she's-the-kids'-mom-a-total-crazie who wants back into their lives just for the big drinks and free company and even though she's clapping at all the wrong times and red faced from the wine just let her drink and let her dine and let her dance and let her cry. Not that I've ever gotten drunk, danced, cried, and eaten six meals between midnight and 4am when I closed my eyes and passed out between the curb and some fries. Never, never, never.

Did I tell you what a great dancer I am too? And yes I am a singer, but I'm more like the Rihanna of singing and Celine Dion of dancing but anyways, I'm sure, there's no reason to go off on a tangential detour. Either way, I read better than I dance and write better than I sing so you can understand why I have been MIA from this whole thing, this literary scene, I mean not inaction but in action so amazing it would blow your mind. I am a little bit jealous, by my own admission, since I don't know allusion from alliteration and you, you live inside of a literary jukebox where you sniff out like ravenously rampant wild boors hyperboles and imagery and aphorisms and circumlocution (thank you Wikipedia) and I'm just the stiffed-neck imposter standing here with two fistfuls of quarters pretending like I've meta-analyzed Emilie Zola to Jane Austen (thank you about.com writers) and now, here in front of your comprehensive jukebox selection, I'm finally ready with pantameterical precision to choose one of my innumeral lost children to take to McDonald's for a 45 minute happy meal excursion before I have to hit the road to taste the Midnight Ride footprints of Paul Revere in my bonnet and Revolutionary dress just before I push off in my raft, no engine, 3 oars and an Amazon box filled with the last 18 books published by The Harvard Press I don't discriminate if they are words on parchment I will suckle each syllable like lustrous (thank you spellcheck) aromatic goji berries (thank you gardeningchannel.com) and you may wonder this, which lucky child will I select from your jukebox to play with? Well, I just can't choose between Tan and Dostoevsky because I just read all of their works both of them, three times, last night wrapped in a canary terrycloth robe and wrote poetry with my right and with my left puffed three packs of smokes, not all at once of course that's ludicrous and mad even though I once smoked half of a cigarette feeling quite the sexy savoy before realizing I had lit the wrong end and yes, I understand, you punctuate Dickinson like a printer and punch out Tolstoy like paper for all these long long years while I've been away and I just want to say thanks, so much, for being so dedicated and so brave, taking the time to get to know my children, all of them whom I've shut the book on and never got to know and if anyone in here is adopted or has been through foster care and is upset with me and wants to go because I'm analogizing the abandonment cycle where you've been left on the streets of Korea and eating out of alley dumpsters and then found by the police with your brother who was malnourished while you were an 18 month old chubster and then 8 months of foster care later adopted by white parents in an all white Midwest suburb and then recycled your unaddressed internalized fear of abandonment in every important relationship you've ever entered and then had an epiphany at the age of 30 that you really do believe in God and desire Jesus as your center and that you have 47 pages in 8 point font of people you need to see and apologize no joke straight faced and to their eyes for being pretentious or fake or distant from their lives especially to your adoptive father and mother, who spent their entire life savings to adopt you and your biological brother your only lifeblood to your vanished self and provide you unconditional love and redeal you a better hand than the cards that you were dealt but you were pissed off that the drop-ceiling of their emotional and intellectual capability was just not adequate for your I don't know who I am insanity so you shamed them into never stepping a foot into your room or your track meets or any compartment of your cold and callous heart until you cried a month ago in a minivan and said you were so sorry and begged your beautifully innocent mother for forgiveness for missing out on the love she tried to give you while you pissed years out the window - please stand up. Does that describe anybody here? No?
Great, so glad I don't have to say I'm sorry to anyone because saying sorry is for total duds and weak kneed pigeons so anyways moving on, back to my lovely unread children.

You know, I'm already pretty tipsy not as much as I was at my parents 25th anniversary party that I planned and then drank seven giant vodka tonics at and danced with my dad's 4 foot 10 inch tall cowboy hat wearing retired coworker but that's neither here nor there, right, no I can't see the buttons and I should save these quarters because I always keep fistfuls to drop into the buckets of homeless men and women who I pass by and forget they have a name and a story and a life and then go home and beat my mental unhumanitarian feet so that they might feel the pain just for a moment of what it's like to stand freezing on the street for three winter years and beg for the change other people drop in jukeboxes then go the bathroom and stand in line like herded sheep, so they can fix their makeup and adjust their bra and pick a 14 dollar dinner and 30 bucks of beer out of their teeth, and then by the time they come out, Rihanna is over and Celine Dion's about to start.

Yeah so, on second thought, I will not be selecting any of my children to play with today I'm so sorry children, dead or alive, Mummy will be back and it won't take me 30 years this time - so I may look like I'm from some East Asian peninsula but it always bodes well for me to sound white and Britishly on the phone when I'm yelling at a Comcast representative to just connect me with their billing department because they've overcharged me for 6 months straight and have no idea how difficult it is to have a 2 year old clawing at your leg as that automated bloat sings her digitized refrain "I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response, please say your thirty-nine digit account code followed by the pound" and just as I'm about to finish verbally cracking the dizzying davinci code my 4 year old daughter yells "I don't like marbles!" I mean, not that I have two small children living at home because I have no home I only roam in Twain's swathy colloquially infested rivers and in the fragmented pastoral mysticism of Faulkner (thanks answers.com).

So, in the meantime, please take care of them for me, I promise that I will come back to look at them, perhaps borrow them just to stack them on my nightstand, adore them as decorations to make me look astute and well-read then in 6 months I'll return them, a coffee stain or pizza grease or a few snickers chocolate fingerprints but always, always,
I will regret just one small thing in my being MIA from this literary scene for so long - that there's just something not quite in me that you've got that you can wrap your comprehension around the words of these children, the authors of our history, and you can absorb them, breathe them, hold them and read them explain them without pretense, quietly, for the one tacit reason that you must because they aliven a golden strand of silk truth that connects to the belly of your soul and if they disappeared from your life, so would you so you don't sell them out of your garage or loan them without knowledge but with insistence that they go to nurturing untrembling hands not strange foreign lands where they will be left beneath scattergories and 13 inches of unopened mail and a diet coke can. So to you, I tell you this - my admiration of this scene and everyone here shines like a child's flashlight from afar as drunk as I may be sitting in the back in my broken glass jar, though I stopped drinking three months ago because I realized that alcohol for me is my sin bottled up and pointless and empty, so this sober light that I shine is as much upon the literary faces of those whose writing lives have lifted our universe upon the pin of their imaginations as it shines upon you, you who know that if you were not here, perhaps literature and the writing art just like children would disappear into thin air from our textbooks and conversations, microphones and constellations, and it's for the next generation that you will and must continue to raise them at the foothills here of cafes and writing groups, or your confessional reading chair you cry inside in the corner of your living room, or maybe it's your closet or your notebook or your skin but somewhere you take your soul and confess out loud what your burning lungs can't hold in. And since honesty is and has always been my motto, this is what I must confess: I am a deadbeat poet, an estranged writer, but with your help, and your support, maybe one day far far away, I'll pick up my pen and cast golden strands of silk words like the knotted velvet souls I don't understand or haven't read or bothered to appreciate or know and I'll humble myself as bleeding ink like a footnote upon the shadow of their shadows, and perhaps over many'a coffee stains and freezing winters and apologetic tears, I will pen enough inadequate love letters to pull me out of the regret of not listening to my heart but listening to my fears, for 30 dusty years I've ignored all the words that have now called me back to life, and maybe one day you will invite me over to your home to stay a while to sit inside your beautiful literary jukebox collection that wait in rows on the bookshelves of your affection, just so long as, just one time, you'll follow my golden strand, give me one momentary glance, then read the confessions of an adopted mother who was given a second chance.