two halves of the moon

Her night wings glimmered
like her eyes
and she said Me?
I prefer the dark side of the moon.

He asked Why?
and she knew.

She said See.
No he said seeing nothing.

You and I we're the same.
How so? he asked.
Answers we can see but
wonder we cannot she said looking up still.

She paused and he paused.

She asked him Now which side of the moon do you prefer?
And he answered The part that I can see of course.

She knew but she said Alright, and

If that is true go home tonight
And if you think only of your answer
And not of your question then stay away forever.
But if it is your question that nags you come back
by night tomorrow.

And he went.

The next night split cold stars sky-wide and he returned
to her and said I too must prefer the dark side of the moon.

What? she said and he was baffled.
Last night we spoke and you told me
your preference for the dark side of the moon
and for wonderment and questions over
light and answers
and I returned because I was as you said--
nagged by my question.

I don't know what you're saying or
Who you are or why you are telling me these things
She said and flew away for good.
A half-illuminated night.

He stood by wondering.

sorry kid

too bad kid we build you wonderless let you mistake your ideas for accidents let you wear test scores like brand apparel call it: Failure too sad we push the already written upon the almost written dying to be written you kid, a future that never arrives all that cosmic potential fizzles toward numb and never shame we can't widdle you out the shape you're in amidst tangled words and manufactured education your child-voice chimes: "why bother?" only because it might change your life kid

in between folds

"And when he said that I saw him transform in front of me, origami art of a thousand, now a thousand and one, beautiful folds of mystery. How life is in the folding and love, my, how love is in the unfolding."     

that subway girl

I ain't got a whole lot
sides a 97' chevy and a
mississippi dream bout some
riverboat city I seen
once
in a magazine

momma woulda said
God left it on that subway train
found me sleepin in a heap tell me
go west, get out of these streets
follow Me out of these streets

regret is just some runaway
teenage footsteps I can never retrace
last thing momma said to me
before I slammed the door in her face
I love you, come back home
when your heart gets too lonely
from being alone, baby girl you know
I'm with you wherever you go
i am with you -
where ever - you go

gone and seven years too late
I still listen for her in the rain
so come on momma runaway with me
our midnight 97's bout to leave
sure we ain't got a lot
just a mississippi magazine
bout some riverboat city I seen
once

missing the pinhole

I've been missing the
pinhole girl
where echoings rise
feet deep
one soft light puncture
pen-tip shadow through
cave tunnel and the allegory
bats closed an eyelet
revolving illusions meet, sunset
blink there it goes
away    long stretched
night returns as does
one fine golden strand   flickers
in waiting
follow the listening
for what comes
keeps still

to l.s.m.

The purpose of life is not to get you out of the moment you're in. It's not to unboulder that rock that has plunged from the sky and landed smack in the middle of your one lane highway out of this place. No, the task is to sweat beady drippings of salt water this very instant, gruesome tired and desperate for air as you are. The muscles in your face you have forgotten clench and ease. Clench. and ease. Your jaws of steel memories - let them be. You must let them go. They have little beauty in the raw wilderness of this your one wild and precious life because the beauty is in the living. You saved that little girl's life, not as storage for a future time but because you were meant to do it. She will never intersect your healing hands again.

This rock will never fall this way again.

You see the rock. Yes go to it. Lean upon its weight instead of fighting against its burden. Go, yes, and lean. Fully into it, your strength gone and its strength - unmovable. The task of the moment, this rock, is exactly what you feel: frustration, humiliation, confusion, suffering, loneliness. Its necessity is demanding everything from you - come back alive to the present, leave your wayward dreaming of phantoms so that you may know each of these parts of you so deeply that you call them by their name. They cut you open upon its rough face and you bleed out exactly what you must. It is flesh against rock. The rock has won and you surrender to it, the moment, like a wailing breath into the sky and it happens - the instant has passed and you feel the weight shift like a different hour of your life has come. Or gone. The confusion is in not really knowing.

The purpose of this moment is not to get you to the next. Chances are, it will, and that's why we take these moments for granted - we expect them to pass before they happen or desire for them to not happen and pass. Pass along moments, go away time. I want to live another way, inside another interval better than this one now. But life will not happen that way. It happens only the way it happens, and in that order. 

Lean upon the rock because it will hold you up long enough to let you rest, to close your eyes, to slow your breathing, to feel its gritty layers against your calm surface. The rock has a story to tell that will change your life forever if you will rest your heart upon it and listen.        

the beginning and the end

I wanted to write about love and wondered how to begin. Like the freshman philosophy major mulling over existence in a vintage coffee bar then asking Socrates so what do you think? There's those rare birds when SMACK, the answer actually is bigger than the question, so enormously big that the question can't hold it all in and is afraid, seriously afraid, to be asked at all. Here is the keen latitude where a question observes its own smallness, stripped down poetry like humility upon gravel beneath waters because the answer could build a stone empire up to the heavens upon its rickety back, or create an avalanche so mighty that all matter collides, every direction smashing circuits, one giant bursting golden cloud shimmering dust, covering space, mixing air, down and down into the dwelling hearts of earth. Yes Love is. Bigger than a simple rule though it is simply the greatest rule.

Once upon a time a person was given life and was born, a whole long life made up of days and days and days and days so endless that they felt like they would never end, and the great I Am asked the person to love Me and to love them and to love again and to love again and yes to love again and the person replied that's it? But on the last day of her first life in the last air of her last breath she exhaled and said oh, that's it.


That's it. 

porter square, 8:30am

every city intersection is a child's laboratory
two microscopic lenses and extrospective curiosity.
ordinary observation of magnetic behavior
the running late-ers, occasional hand hold-ers
the locked upon bicycle seat-ers, the repel-lers
traveling opposite of where they should.
most coming near or going away aware of
not much, least of which--awareness itself--
their specimen role in a naturally occurring
social experiment and the child, nature's greatest
scientist, without agenda, except to transmit
instinct, of how the tree above
has fingers reaching the sky. cars are music.
specimens transact exactly: rise, dress,
purpose to pavement.
behave knowing their elemental limits.
temporary scientist, his paradox awareness,
knows none.

Aw, Peanuts.

I opened a blank page to write at 12:34am. At 12:34am and a few seconds later I decided to make myself a big lazy ice cream sundae - vanilla ice cream three scoops, a wallop of chocolate syrup, and a handful of nuts shipped to our address from - the Virginia Peanut Company - sent in beautiful packaging to Mr. Zack Hickman who to my knowledge does not live with us, a company that would not provide me with the sender's contact information or contact him on my behalf so that I could return it or track Mr. Hickman myself, a company that told me "enjoy the nuts!" back in mid-December while I was still gung-ho on doing the right thing and not keeping a giant 3 pound canister of overpriced gourmet snack food that could've well been Planters in fancier casing. A company that I just said "oh screw it" to when I got back 10 days before February to an apartment with no food sans lots of packaged items like spanish rice and cannellini beans and a pristine box addressed to a man who's probably living in Sandusky, Ohio with a mysterious new woman who brought with her a suitcase, two chickens and a nut allergy.

You know, I'm kind of fed up feeling guilty all the time doing not-on-my-priority list things and skipping the higher-on-my-priority list things like writing, like reading the Bible, like praying, like playing, like writing a letter to Mr. Burkey to let him know that 11th grade AP government lit a small fire under my ass. Instead of the Bible I read three weeks ago a book called Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, an Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. with a speck of dirt and decided he didn't know what to do so why not become a teacher. He taught in six different schools in New York City - high schools, vocational schools, even a fashion institute (for a month). He wrote about students like they mattered, each searing a sort of identity into his skin - some deep, some deeper. Like they were part of his nature and composition even when he wished they weren't. He gave himself over. Stood up there, a victim of thousands of teenagers' surgical scrutiny, sometimes their adoration, always their mystery, six classes a day like clockwork.

Reading it reminded me that I felt guilty for not reading what I shoulda; reminded me that most teachers start idealists; reminded me about never writing that damn letter to Mr. Burkey, you know, the who's the teacher who made a difference in your life? letter that I've air-composed at least once a year since I graduated from high school, you know - writing it with my finger in the air like you do when you talk to someone who isn't there, when you imagine their responses, the small twitch when they see your name in the corner of the envelope, their eyes squinting to remember your face and who you are. It's undramatic, really. It's because I've never written it that I don't write it. It needs to be about six lines long. Hey Mr Burkey, remember me? Blah blah, blah, I really appreciated your passion for teaching, I wanted to let you know. Blah blah Boston blah blah kids blah blah. Best wishes, Stacey. No big deal. But 14 years later I'm writing a blog entry and not a letter. And eating ice cream with peanuts that technically don't belong to me.

McCourt was 66 years old when he wrote his first book, Angela's Ashes. It won a Pulitzer. He spent his Irish childhood suffering then took thirty adult years doing painful magic in a classroom. Learning all that reassured me that I have 3 more decades to wither away my own speck of dirt before I have to - in the words of Patti Digh - just sit the hell down and write. I wither on in glass and fog like time is mine to spare.

A quote from a famous author: "Publishing may be a Pulitzer but having written the book is the prize." Actually, that's just plain BS. I just made that up so I could segway into this: I love and loathe famous quotes. Some are amazing, said or scribed by famous people who are famous for lovely and heroic reasons. But some of the wisest and most beautiful things are unborrowed and said quietly to no one and I hear them when people think I'm not listening. Daughters hear them. Sons hear them. Spouses hear them and wish they could capture the air right then right there, before they melt away. Memory always does - but those are the imperceptible nothings, little splices of passing wisdom that, when added up over years and years become a feeling that can't be described except as maybe, "fondness."  Because even when you can't remember whole years and whole decades you see their faces talking with words spilling out that you can't hear, like a silent movie, and you remember how you felt sitting near to them and you felt good. Their words didn't feel famous; they felt true.

But hey, at least I've written something tonight, gotten something down. Hey soul! Look here! So I'm feeling mediocre and my stomach is full and my gut is saying go to bed and read the good book. I was at a friend's house on Wednesday and she was getting rid of a box of books so I nosed around and lifted out One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez thirdly because the title was luring and secondly because I had actually heard of it and firstly because the cover was pretty, a mosaic painting of greens and blues that made me feel something towards them. The book was thick and the cover was light so I took it to help shield me from my own to do list written in the tortured ink of my SOUL, tortured not because my soul is tortured but tortured because I'm so deliberately deflective of what I'm begging myself to do. Sure, soul, I'll do what you want me to do, but first let me get through my US Weekly. Foreign Policy better? How's about a novel? I once read a book on writing and it said that to be a writer you need to read, so I'm reading to write and not writing so I can read and feeling feeble and guilty when I do either since you can't do both at once, and that sounds about a nick below right and a hair above wrong which is fine by me because there's always middle-ground ambiguity and anyways that's the grey space I'm used to, and I fear, unfortunate for my grand dreams, where I most like to stay.

It's a funny thing, this writing thing. Because now it's 1:29am and I've done what I knew I should. But I think about that letter and how that's what I shoulda done. Shoulda done instead of clamoring inside these flat night margins like a fool, flapping wings over absolutely nothing except procrastination and are you serious? Peanuts? Peanuts!?

Aw, peanuts.

on not writing

Finding time is a carving knife: hack deep and away at meat corners. Pull delicate skin from fat and cut. Five trim minutes here. Eighteen minutes there. One straight thinking hour is ripping up, close to bone. Into cavernous ribs. Snap them apart one by one or all at once, long curved keys flying off a broke piano. One that is wrong or refuses sound. Crack down anyway, you try and try your slippery tries to grasp odd calcified shapes. They aren't good; at times awful: thick buried noises, rambling trauma. Fling them to walls, heaped membrane and mess.

There was one uncomfortable instant between gluttony and pride when I just did it. Struck straight down into muscle and tore something out. Twisted my brain into the cage, the inhale crushing, and wrote up. It beat beat beat, weak thing bled beet red.

3:14 life

there's something about 3:14 life
when your small children breathe by your side
in a dark room
when, you are the only soul on earth awake

to coax the rattling in their lungs quiet
distress of their dreams
asleep by the skin of your light fingers
along the hair of their brows
down the softness of their chins

you feel special magic to heal them
for the time being and also for the times
when their warm bodies are long and you reach
and they reach but do not meet