While I Waited.

I wrote some poetry.

That was unexpected.

I was sitting in the window seat of the Starbucks in Noe Valley waiting for my person and I was reading my Psychodynamics reader.

I am just a few pages shy of finishing it, however, I discovered that there were readings missing in the reader and I will have to go online and find them.

Which would explain some of my confusion with the class, there is a system that the school uses called Canvas, and when my professor was referring to articles online, well, I thought she meant this platform.

Nope.

She literally meant online.

But online is where I can’t get to right now.

My internet is woefully slow.

I am not certain that I am going to be able to get onto my blog tonight.

I am going to try.

I have been trying for a while now.

That being said, I don’t necessarily have to write my blog on the wordpress site.

It is my preference.

But as so many things in life, my preference is not always what happens.

I would have preferred it if my professor had put all the articles together in one spot, I like having them all printed out in the reader, it helps me organize and I like to underline and take notes.

Hard to do that when I am reading an article online.

I also find it more difficult to read anything online.

It just works better for me to be off the page than on a screen.

I am old fashioned.

I am quite alright with that old-fashionedness as well.

I like writing sonnets.

Who writes sonnets anymore?

I like writing in notebooks with a pen.

Of course.

I also love writing my blog and I love how fast my fingers fly over the key board when the words are coming out of my head and they just seem to pop right onto the page in front of me, the wordcount rolling ever higher.

There is a distinct pleasure in the use of the keyboard as well.

No denying it.

But there is the writing and the reading and the old way of doing it that pleases me just as much if not a tiny bit more.

While I was waiting for my person and reading my reader I had something pop out at me and I re-read it and thought of the conversation I had my with my friend in his office while we were discussing poetry and architecture, and art, and life, burning man, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, and whilst he and I were in the middle of a conversation he said the most astounding thing and in a flash I grabbed my bag of pens and fished out a notebook and wrote it down.

It happened to be my Psychodynamics notebook.

The very same notebook I had in my lap while I was reading about Transitional objects and play and post-Freudian theory.

There were words in the article that resonated with the conversation from yesterday and there was something in the music playing in the café and the mania of a homeless man who kept coming in and out of the door.

At one point he smacked his palms on the glass in front of my face to get my attention.

I got lost in the moment, picked up my notebook, found the line of conversation that I had wrote down yesterday, and then intermixed with thoughts of a love I began writing a poem.

And I thought all my poetry was gone.

As though I was a fraud, a one shot, a one trick pony.

The only thing standing in between me and my fraudulence yet another sonnet.

The muse has not left the building.

Sometimes the muse is a homeless man demanding attention.

And I have to pick up the pen.

It is a compulsion and a thickening in my blood, a swirl, a cataclysm of thought and power and shadow and love.

Always the love.

So here.

For you this Saturday eve.

A new sonnet.

The Place Where We Live

The real thing is the thing that is not there.

I mean the thing you put in between

The reality of the love and the shadow of fear.

The soft bellied swallow a hush mark, a skein

Of feathers, a brush of your hand through my hair.

And the kiss of your mouth upon my neck.

I think these things underneath the fair

Stream of light. A caustic cushion, the feck-

Lessness of your bravado. A wash of scent

I wallow through, a marsh of hazard and light,

Star light, the pitter pat of manic hands, the bent

Minded man, a harrowing, a heart broken with blight.

Transitional objects bereft with casual longings.

And then you, here, not there, my darling, my belonging.

And then I reflected.

Really reflected on my life in this last year.

Where I was a year ago to where I am now is astounding.

I was in the front dining room of The Beach Chalet having a late dinner with my ex-boyfriend.  We were talking about an incident that had happened the night before and how it had stirred up some old child hood traumas.

I remember looking out the plate glass window of the second story of the Beach chalet the back lit restaruant and empty tables reflected in the window, the press of the dark night, the heaviness of the ocean, the lowering sky, and how was I ever going to navigate through it all.

There was no there there.

There was no place to call home.

Even in the attempt to communicate with the person sitting next to me, arm against arm, body to body, there were only the words stilted, shamed, guilty, driven, soft, remorse, the belly of a newt tender and spotted, I wriggled in helplessness and despair I could not accurately name or own or speak to.

I had lost my voice in the relationship even as the relationship was developing.

It fell apart to soon thereafter.

But I learned.

I grew.

I walked through a lot of pain for it was in the remonstrances of my past that came floating back to settle on my skin again and teach me what I had to repair and where I needed to go further and what needed to be healed.

No surprise that not many weeks later I was in the epicenter of it all.

Alaska.

Anchorage.

My father in a coma the stench of alcohol still on his skin, the delierium tremens that would happen and shake his body like palsy in a doll, the bruises on his hands and knees, the short hospital gown that would rise and reveal his genitals in the writhing, the nurses, in and out, the beeping, the admonitions to hold his hands, talk to him, all the emotions and falling.

The loneliness of that room in the quarters for the family adjacent to the urgent care facility of the hospital.

The snow on the ground.

The late sunrise and the early sunset.

So many things.

All the things.

All the things that broke my heart.

Broke it open wide and left it there, a rose of bloodletting, then forgiving, then letting go.

The last kiss on his cheek days later, surprised by the warmth of his skin, the stubble on my lips as I pressed my mouth to his face.

I choked inside.

Grabbed my luggage and rolled it out the door holding back the sobs until I could get into the empty waiting room and crumple against the check in desk where no one manned the reception except a quiet God and the soft voice inside me to forgive and move on, to get into the elevator and go home.

Back here.

Back home.

Back to a man that wasn’t to be with me much longer but from whom I learned where I needed to work on myself next.

And oh.

The work.

I did it though.

And when I met with my person and acknowledged all those things from here to there.

And the love.

Oh there is so much love.

Love I cannot talk about yet, here, in a way that makes any sense, just love.

Suffice to say.

Love.

Like a crescendo of light petals from star flowers.

A shattering.

I am smote.

Yet.

I rise up in this love and I am seen.

I.

Am

Known.

Tags: art, ex-boyfriend, family, father, my person, poetry, postaday, recovery, San Francisco, sonnets, writing