I Don’t Know

And I mean that with every ounce of my being.

I don’t know shit.

But.

I’m showing the fuck up anyway.

Doing the deal.

“What are you going to do?” She asked me two years ago this July, we were just pulling into the Caribou Coffee shack on my way to the airport in Minneapolis.

I had been having a rough couple of months.

I had a severe, like ridiculously severe, in an air cast, out of work, in bed, crying like a baby, unable to do anything for myself, except put on funny stripe socks to bolster my mood, ankle injury and I was heading back to precarious work and the not knowing.

The constant not knowing.

It could have killed me.

Or not.

In the end, it didn’t.

I do remember telling her, my friend who doesn’t have my disease but has some sense of it, she’s a smart cookie, that it ultimately doesn’t matter.

I have a purpose.

I have one primary purpose.

And as long as I take care of that I will be alright.

“I just really want to use heroin,” she wept into the phone.

Well fuck that.

We got together.

We sat over tea.

We did the deal.

We hugged it the fuck out.

And I feel like stellar motel in the sky with lucy and diamonds on the soles of my shoes.

I could dance party until dawn and work a full shift with my boys and be absolutely spot on.

It does not matter what I do.

Well.

Ok.

There are some things I need to do, help others, be a good friend, show up, share my experience, strength, hope, the good stuff, the what works for me stuff.

I don’t advise.

I just give some suggestions and let it go.

Sometimes it is heady and intellectual, but tonight, for me, it was all heart and love, unconditional love for a woman who’s name, ha, I just realized, I don’t know her last name.

If this was a lover.

I might, um, a, be you know.

I tiny bit ashamed of myself for not having his last name on the tip of my tongue.

But this?

Fuck no.

It’s not important.

What is important is that I made myself available and I mainly just listened.

I’m not a doctor.

I’m not a therapist.

Yet.

But.

I have a special set of skills and with those and some experiences to share, some working knowledge of a basic text, I have a purpose.

I have a point.

I was just reflecting on this as I was looking over air fare to Wisconsin for July 4th weekend.

Yeah.

I know.

Am I fucking nuts?

The Midwest in July.

Do I want to die?

The mosquitos will be big as rescue helicopters.

The humidity will make my curly hair a wild mess.

I will get some stares.

I have a few tattoos.

And though they are more prolific in the Midwest than they used to be, I guess folks be watching LA Ink or something, there are still few women who have neck tattoos or chest tattoos or partial sleeves, let alone all three.

Plus.

Heh.

My hair will be pink.

Which.

Whatever.

The last time I was there it was half purple and blue.

I got a few looks.

I got proselytized to as well outside of the ice cream store in downtown scenic Hudson on the river.

Nothing like a young girl, a teenager, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen I would guess, talking to me about God.

Oh doll.

I know God.

And I know God well.

Do I understand God?

Fuck no.

Does God understand me?

Yup.

Do I need to know what God is or does or how God works or doesn’t work?

Nope.

I just have this deep, unshakeable belief in this entity that absolutely and completely loves the fuck out of me.

Who also has a wicked sense of humor.

And.

Never, ever, ever.

Ever, ever?

Never.

Has failed to take care of me.

Ever.

I don’t always get what I want.

But I have never not gotten what I needed.

And so often.

All the time really.

I am surprised, blown away, beleaguered by the love I am given.

All I have to do is turn and shine that love on someone else.

And I am taken care of.

Taken care of in the best sense of the world.

Sometimes I imagine, my small, petty, limited mind.

That my God is a gigantic sunken living room with white fur carpet everywhere.

Hella plush.

Big old pillows everywhere.

Warm soft fuzzy

There is a fire pit.

There are big, huge, gigantic floor to ceiling windows with let in oodles of warm gold light.

I am held in this luxurious love.

Sometimes God is a memory.

A sense of flying.

A swimming through the aqua blues and greens of the pool at the high school in DeForest, swimming laps back and forth in the last lane, the one by the windows, when on a quiet Sunday the pool was empty, the parking lot empty, and no one in the pool be me swimming in and out of patches of aquamarine love.

Held.

Perfect.

Serene.

A float.

Sometimes it is the emotional, melodic beat of drums.

The pounding in my heart that echoes a song.

A rhythm.

My body moves without thought and dance.

Dance is God.

Music is God.

Love is God.

All of it.

I am all of it.

Subsumed.

Taken.

Ravished.

Overtaken.

God is art.

God is standing love struck like a bulldozed girl on Valentines day who finally gets the red carnations call over the loud speakers in school from the principal’s office, come get your flowers at lunch break, to find out that it was her secret crush who had a secret crush on her too, in front of Kandinsky’s “Accent en Rose” at the Pompidou when I moved to Paris in my 40th year of life.

Cold.

Wet.

Miserable with the rain and the getting lost and the hungry but not sure for what.

The aching legs from walking lost in the Marais, the wet socks, the squish, so un melodious, of my Converse as I stepped onto the escalator up to the fifth floor.

Sacre Couer in the distance.

The towers of Notre Dame.

Montparnasse.

The sky mottled with grey, purpled, black, silver lined rain clouds, the bent heads scurrying through the courtyard underneath the flimsy arms of tourist stall umbrellas.

Wondering down the hall.

Wonder (ing) in wander.

Wander (ing) in wonder.

Awed and overcome.

Constricted with the pleasure of art unfolding around me.

Then I turn and see the Kandinsky and I am rose flushed.

Flashed out in love.

High on art.

Stranded in the wilderness of my romantic heart.

Bereft and beguiled.

Beatitudes battering my breath.

Caught.

There.

High in my throat.

Tears welling up and sweltering onto my fevered face.

God.

Is in the details.

In the ellipses between the frames.

In the pause before the eruption of fireworks after the rocket has launched into the sky.

God is.

Or God.

Is not.

What is your choice to be?

I already made mine.

Love.

Always there.

Always holding me.

Always this.

Always this.

Always this.

Love.

My love.

Just.

Love.

 

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Mon cherie.

I miss you so.

And I come up for air.

A hot bowl of soup on a cold night.

A warm face to say to, happy I am today, how are you?

Love fills my heart and it stills my face and then I sit and stare at the walls and wish that the light was still there.

But it is the dark.

The night of winter.

The cold laying frost.

The dormant.

Before the growth.

That is what I believe.

And there is so much love, so much grace, so much more than you can ever imagine, than I can ever imagine and I sing poetry under my breath wishing to encapsulate it all.

I cannot though.

There is a fullness, a fire, a heat, a warmth, a softness, a softening, an astounding, a tenderness, and it aches with all that it does.

I just wrote “id.”

Freudian slip.

Excuse me.

Where was I?

I digress.

She’ll break her own heart.

A beautiful death, that.

And a poem for you that I wrote, aching and full and saddened in the seeping twilight sky that bled rain through the ragged grey clouds outside the window of my class Thursday morning.

I am Going to Go Now

The unwinding inevitable, the snowflake dredged with grime

A kissing time, a hand print fingered dove grey

Soot smeared and dusted with transitory crimes–

Passion pushed, outlined darkling cashmere fey.

Smudged with the meaning of God, gold patterned

Euthanasia, impacted without you, focused after life

Fabled and unique.  This too is true.  Maneuvered

Polite, we dance the waltz of unspoken strife

Rife with lusted desire.  Pagan with practice

Patience and archetypal, the sparked pointed Southern

Crossing resurrected, convicted by love, the chalice

Over full, the wetness on my lips, the flight, a turn,

Rebirth, the exodus of uncertainty belies my certainty

Of you and our luminous connecting, a mastered calamity.

I am grateful for passing time, even when it pains in the passing.

I have felt achey and full and wide open and perhaps that has something, everything, to being in school these last three days.  Not a night in three that I got more than five hours sleep, not a day that didn’t go by where there weren’t tears.

I am in school to be a therapist.

The tears, they do happen.

They happen sometimes in class, sometimes after, sometimes, more times this past week than I really wanted to, when I went to bed, the slip of tears on my face.

Potentially lonely/perpetually human/suspended and/open/open.

OPEN.

So wide open.

So painfully, wide open.

It feels like my heart is on a plate, not silver, not a platter, but a plate, bone china, the cusp of the new moon gilding the edge.

It’s a good place to be.

This teetering on the cusp.

It sounds painful.

And.

Yes.

It is.

And yet, so alive.

So exquisite.

So enlivened.

So playful, when I don’t feel shattered in the leavings of my old idea and the imprinting of the new upon that smote landscape of love and loss and longing.

Smote.

That is how it feels.

Searing.

The grief rolls through, over, and plunges me down and there, a stillness, a pearlescent shell, a spiral, the nautilus, the tiny chambers of soul lit phosphorescent and gilt.

I climb in and float away.

This embedded moment brought to you by listening to too much Regina Spektor (but oh, there is no such thing as too much, not really not ever) and the sad sweetness of end times and new beginnings.

I had my last class today of the semester.

I had a long day, a long week, a big weekend and now, it’s back to work.

With a brief moment of respite in the evening with a friend over soup and Thai food over in the hood.

I have had so much happen over this past six months and it astounds and I look about and I realize I have almost made it and there is still so much more to go, so more to be realized.

So much more of me to be realized.

And so.

And so.

So.

I don’t understand/if I kiss you where it’s sharp/if I kiss you were it’s sore/will you feel better?/better/better/will you feel anything at all.

ANYTHING AT ALL.

Oh.

I will.

I assure you, I will feel all the feels.

Little fuckers.

I am feeling all of them.

Grateful that tonight I will get a full night’s sleep, and yes, there could be more tears on the pillow, tears aren’t such a bad thing, my small dulcet downfall, the shallow sip of sea salt on my cheeks, the flush of my face against the sheet pulled up by my head, the crush of the weight of love and the foolish tender softness of dreams that push themselves into the wet lashes resting on the tops of my cheeks.

The stars, that old light, the seeps in between the cracks.

The liminality of love.

The threshold to the moon.

I watched the sky today while I sat in the student kitchen, the bright, high blue, the push of scudded white bounded clouds, the flight of a seagull in between the buildings.

I ate an apple with sea salt sprinkled over it.

I thought about eating apples, walking the streets of Paris, cold and scared and alive and undone and all done back up again.

I go back in a week.

I thought about Paris.

I thought about the paintings.

Kandinsky, Accent en Rose, at the Pompidou.

Kandisky-Accent in Rose

I thought about the alone.

I thought about the aliveness in me.

I felt the lonely and the alive and the love and let it wash over me, the soar of the gull in the sky, the press of the blue, the powder of the clouds, the clock over the counter winding down the minutes to my last class of the day.

That much closer.

Still so far away.

A reckoning on the horizon.

Love in the streets, the cobblestones smothered in shine and light from the lamp posts, the impossible sparkle of the Eiffel Tower.

Dazzle

And my heart a glow.

A small spot, a spiral of ember over the ocean, the rushing sea, the Christmas tree burning on the edge of the water, the beach a bonfire of holiness and the beckoning of the North Star.

I know not into what I walk.

But I walk ever forward.

Joy smeared and sacred with the smut of my own carnal life, the living.

It is good.

Don’t let me fool you.

It is all good.

So good.

So overwhelmingly painfully.

Wonderfully.

Good.

It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt.

It does.

I am still the love smitten fool.

Who would I be?

If I weren’t wearing my heart on my sleeve.

At least it goes well with my clothes for Paris.

Transparent authenticity usually does.

And perfect attire for riding to the top of the ferris wheel.

I’ll blow you kisses from the pinnacle.

I promise.

They may be burnished bittersweet.

But.

They will.

Be.

All.

Mine.

Disingenuous

This is how I feel.

I thought about it for a minute.

“Well,” he paused, on the other end of the phone line, waiting for me while I thought hard, while I pulled my thoughts together, when I got honest.

With him.

With myself.

“It doesn’t feel right,” I said.

“As soon as you said “disingenuous” I knew,” he said, “it’s not about what he wants, it’s about what you want and being a 42-year-old woman who is working full-time, in recovery, and going to grad school, well, sport fucking doesn’t suit you, now, does it?”

Well.

Damn it man, when you say it like that, I suppose not.

I have been in a quandary.

I have been on the fence.

I have been holding my counsel and keeping things tight to my breast.

I have been keeping them tucked between tongue in cheek.

Hidden between the corsage on my label and the heart skin under the velvet sheath dress.

“I don’t want you to write about me,” he asked.

Sure.

But then.

When do I write about me?

How does that affect me?

When does not writing about him influence me.

Am I writing for an audience?

No.

I am writing for myself and I may rue this blog.

Or.

That blog.

Or the other one over there.

But.

I am restricting myself in my lack of not writing about what has been sitting on my chest.

See.

I have been seeing someone and I won’t say who.

That is private.

I have been dating.

It’s been fun.

Hell.

It’s been more than fun, like when my face hurts from laughing so long and so loud or I find myself inadvertently snorting, gah, I wish that would not happen, but it does on occasion slip out, when I make the sushi face in front of a man, when I am myself times fifteen, when I am vulnerable and me and silly and seen.

Well.

After awhile I have to start writing about some of it.

Some of what lies in that dark night of my heart.

I feel that ache there, just underneath my skin, that pulsing and pulling.

The nerves.

Because.

Well.

He reads my blogs.

Hi you.

I know, I know, I can hear what you are saying–you my friends and fellows–don’t put your heart out there, don’t write about it.

But.

That’s like being in Paris in the rain and not writing about walking the wet streets with shoes soaked in water and cold toes and cold nose and the umbrella bought at a book shop is not holding up and you go into the Pompidou and see Kandinsky’s Accent en Rose and you don’t write about that.

I get art high.

He gets me high.

Laughing high.

Sweet high.

Delirious and sweet and soft and goofy and me.

And the gift is that we are friends and the gift is that we are not naming it and the gift is that we are dating but not in a relationship.

So what’s the problem?

Well.

Dating other people.

We are adamantly not in a relationship.

This is agreed upon.

There is not a bone in my body that says I have to be this man’s girlfriend or that’s it, it’s over.

There is so much more to it than that.

A romantic relationship is off the table.

Although the signifiers are there and I argue that there is romance and sweetness and grace and goodness and moon eclipses over the city and moon sets on the beach and the hand holding are all signs for romance.

Courting.

I like being courted.

I like being pursued.

Who the hell doesn’t?

What I realize that I can’t do.

What I realize that is disingenuous to me.

Is that I don’t want to date other men, it’s not about the non-exclusivity clause or the I want to be claimed or titled or anything.

I am happy with the present moment.

It is a gift.

He is a gift.

My life is full of gifts.

So much so that I sit in awe just looking around my beautiful little studio, the colors and the light, the framed Marilyn on the wall–it’s up!

Finally, the amazing Sturteveant “Double Trouble” print of the Black Marilyn Monroe that I got at the MOCA in LA months ago.

it is so gorgeous and dreamy and rich and luscious.

So like my life.

And my life is rich and wonderful because I am looking deeper inside my heart at every moment that I can stand to.

I realized in talking with my person this afternoon that it does not matter what he, the man, or the men, or whomever in my life wants, even when it seems so important and so tantamount to me making a decision about what I want.

In the end what he wants doesn’t matter.

What I want does.

I don’t want to date anyone else.

It feels wrong.

It feels like not being present to the unfolding magic.

It doesn’t feel right.

And.

Yes.

I know.

I am free to change my mind too.

But my mind and my heart are not on the same page.

My mind says, great! Date everybody!

Go out and get it girl!

And then.

Write about it!

Yeah.

Let’s get titillating, shall we?

I’ve done that though.

It doesn’t serve.

It may not mean that it doesn’t serve others.

What others need is not my business.

I have to stay inside my own hula hoop.

I don’t feel right taking another man into my bed when I am seeing someone else, regardless of the title of what that relationship is or lack of title, I know what my heart needs and it’s not to sleep around until the person I want to be with is fully available.

He’s perfectly available for what I have to offer.

And.

The best thing.

I don’t have to do anything about it.

I can not date other men without having to make a big deal out of it.

I’m not about to go running outside and tell all the neighbors or put it out on Facebook, I’m in a relationship with so and so.

No.

I’m his friend.

He is mine.

And I am open to there being more, but I have not expectations.

That’s the change.

That is the big deal for me.

I don’t have expectations.

Sure.

There are desires.

I am 42 and woman and well aware I desire.

That’s well and good.

My heart desires more.

And that is good too.

All hearts are allowed to desire more.

Whether or not the more is down the line is ultimately not my business either.

What is mine is that I can’t go out and date others, I have committed too far in my heart, there’s too much there to ignore it.

Potentially lonely.

Perpetually human.

Suspended and open.

Open.

With what ever risk that involves by being out there.

I am happy putting it out there.

I am ready to fly further out over the dark seas and tie my heart-strings on the tail of comet flaring out over the ocean, a bright streak of light, my precious time on this plane too short to not honor my feelings.

Not his or his.

Or his either.

Mine.

All mine.

To thine own self be true.

I remind myself as I finish and lay the poetry on the table, the sheaf of my hair falling in my eyes as my heart aches already with words and feelings.

And love.

So much damn.

Love.

Who knew there was so much?