"Sit Down" She Said

Nightmares Part 3

The door opens to a small grey room with only a table beside a bed to furnish it, a girl sits at the table writing ferociously in a journal the only thing visible about her is that she is exotic and has been beaten and tortured other than that she could have been any girl in any room and any journal because you could not see her face for the tears and the hair spilling over her head and into her eyes. As she writes a woman comes in and asks her a question, without hesitation she replies savagely. The woman seems unimpressed and strikes her then walks out leaving the girl laying on the floor with blood-mingled tears running down her face. When she looks up all of the walls have transformed into glass and on the other side there are men, taking notes, she looks down and seems to notice that the floor has suddenly become water. She begins to swim, the climate continues to change and the men continue to take notes and the girl continues to cry, and wail, and try, and survive.

Most of the famous love poems begin at the writer,

“Shall I compare thee to a summers day?” “How do I love thee, let me count the ways” “When I love you, I become Liquid light”

and the focus is on how the love affects the author.

You are not loved like that

You are loved from afar by a host of witnesses, partial observers who sing your praises and laud your name. I am merely one of many who’s life’s been changed by your black girl magic.

You are the flower and the sun, an entire ecosystem of beauty, pain, feral aggression, and nurturing softness trapped within skin and summarized with stardust.

You are the rot that consumes, dark slick fertility doing away with that which is dead and dying, prying life away from the undeserving.

You are an all-powerful inevitability, like mycorrhiza, interconnected and an engine of reincarnation turning that which you kill with your terrible, exquisite existence into vibrant life.

You are the power of a fire set spinning into a void, so intense that it attracts life and inspires art and who’s mere proximity is the Prometheus of existence.

You are an illustration of regeneration in motion.

You are not just a pretty girl, or a smart woman or a good person.

You are a vision of the universe manifesting itself to experience life and doing it with such style and grace that it takes my breath away.

And so, I will not disgrace you with talk of the love of possession.

the love of self, reflected in the face of the other.

the love only begat by desire

or need

or lust.

Instead, I will pray to you in the way that the moon prays to the sun.

I will describe the love of a devotee as they turn their face to the façade of their goddess and stand in awe of her power, majesty, and the ineffable certainty that they are unworthy.

I will set a record in stone of the magnificence of you.

I will, if given permission, promise to learn you

I will cleave my soul to yours leaving behind a love that endures and will never end, merely change forms

I will inscribe my adoration on the monolith of you, perfect, deific, angelic, demonic, human,  you

I will learn your habits, like how you take your morning coffee

I will create tender, intimate moments where I simply watch and wonder at the gift of you in my life

I will love you, with every burning, bared, imperfect part of my broken, bruised, and barely beating heart

A Warning to my Future

Look at my Pinterest boards, no seriously do, 

you will find a person covered in tattoos

 upon further exploration, you'll find a transcendent nation 

of a person, or a place or a word 

you'll find quotes and myths, logic and a missing piece 

travel and a mission a need to leave and a desire to stay, 

Knowing that to complete your purpose you have to go and do and see and become before you can make life all that you wanted 

you must leave 

you’ll see recipes and plans, and gardens and the sands of time slipping around the squared edges of the screen 

you’ll see clothing I’ll never wear and ideas I’ll try to write for then lose the inspiration that comes in the night for me and only me 

Reviewing the organization (or lack thereof) you’ll realize truly that I pin what I love 

so one day, my darling I hope I’ll pin you too

To He Who I Once Loved

I promised you something, laying on a curb in a tiny town, bits of broken asphalt digging into my back 

I made a vow under the stars holding your sweaty hand in mine 

I cleaved my heart to yours through a conversation to rival those had by ancient philosophers looking up at the same moon we beheld on that fateful night 

I promised to hold you in my soul even as my body got used to being held by your hands, large and unsure aginst my waist feeling like maybe we were too young to truly love 

I remember that night the snell of the freshly cut grass of the suburbuan maze we wandered deep into the night 

Do you remembeer the years to follow? Telling me I was special but treating me like normal 

Do you remeber breaking my heart? 

I kept my promise but not in the way you may think, I still think of you, the reminder of what we were still makes me cry and I still pray for you I pray for who you may have been and who we could have become but 

my dedication to those promises has been fading even as the skin you touched sloughs off my body in sheets of replacing cells 

Maybe by the time all of it is gone I will be ready to break my promise 

Sometimes

Sometimes I get desperate, 

Sometimes the world screams too loudly and not loudly enough, too loudly for the music to drown out, but not loudly enough to drown out the chaos in my head. 

Sometimes it feels like the black cauldron is swirling in my brain, in that interminible space between the right and left ears there exists a tempest, a whirlwind that only I can hear and I have no miranda to request that her father stops his dreadful awefilled arts. 

Sometimes I play music on my phone, no headphones, the volume turned all the way up and I just lay in the dark waiting for the music to seep into my brain listening to the souls of those who feel like I do the pain of the world. 

Sometimes I hold my phone speaker up to my neck like a knife, not to harm but in a effort to heal, in the way that a surgeons scalpel opens to heal or a syringe enters to heal I try to force the vibrations of the music into my blood. 

Sometimes It’s not enough 

But sometimes ... It is

Tired

Is anyone else exhausted by all the violence?

The needless and senseless bloodspatter patterns that decorate my television walls and the wallpaper of my brain.

From the procedural made commonplace turning horrific crime to daytime entertainment for the lonely and alone at 2pm on a weekday contrasted and compared with the graphics and lies projected on channels with three letters and a failed promise to tell the truth.

A battle rages in my living room, the combatants painfully familiar to each other yet only one is aware of the war going on. The other believes it merely youthful idealism soon to be squelched by the tint of age and cynicism. 

The man medicating with food and numbing the pain of a capitalistic hedonism born lack of hope with the gunshots and head wounds of his favorite "more stuff blows up" drug. And me, the far from peaceful activist cooking and tuning out his chosen coping mechanism with my own, music played louder and louder, that preaches a similar method with drastically different goals. 

One child resigned to nothing, so preemptively tired of the fight that he wishes not to engage in the warfare at all. Running, constantly distancing himself from the truth that another whom he loves totally disregards the pains and existence of others whom he lives in concert with. Those the child sings and dances with, those he performs alongside creating spectacles of beauty and emotion to make the world feel again. 

The other dedicated to the fight long before she even knew there was a war. Desperately trying to explain why and how to care for other people to the ones who first taught her the very empathy she attempts to raise in their hearts. Running towards the fight at home and the fight on the front lines. 

I am tired of sighting, tired of fighting, tired of seeing the tension so broadcast and obvious and yet having the same conversations over and over and over fruitlessly watching those on the other side slowly slide into the muck and drivel they are fed from the very hand that bites them. 

I wish they would choose love, 

or at least

choose me

I dreamt of a Man

I dreamt of a man, with long black hair, curling and twisting like laughter down his back 

I dreamt of a man with bright blue eyes, sparkling and winking and closing at my touch 

I dreamt of a man with long thin hands, strong, graceful and grasping against my skin 

I dreamt of a man taller than I, with head thrown back and face raised high 

I dreamt of a kiss, tender and sweet 

I dreamt of a million kisses all meant for me 

I dreamt of a Man who one day, could belong 

We the few can see them, the lonely hearts, the spirits, the wandering lovers cursed to bring love to others because they lost their true loves in life

Those of us that can see our fae friends all we feel is the loss of their soul, we aren't new, in fact, we are the oldest. we have been around the longest of any of the races 

we are the dryads, we who are kith and kin to the angelic presences and demonic influences because we are bred of both

we who find solace in the wild places 

we who hear the language of the rivers and listen and know the whispering conversations of the trees

we who find out comfort in the waters of the world, the natural people, those who see and hear the truth in the words of the wilds of the world 

Sad in the Desert

Its harder being sad in the desert

The wind bites instead of hugs

The voices of people who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, dug their heels in and decided to die just to spite the people who told them to leave

My ancestors don’t whisper in the long pull of an American Spirit, not out here

My grandfathers voice doesn’t sit at the bottom of that bottle of Jack saying “girl if you don’t straighten up”

Its harder to be sad in the sands and scrub

Its barren and cold

You cant get away from your emotions by walking through the trees and just crying out to the leaves, telling the wind to take your sorrow

Theres just sand, sand and dry

I guess that’s one thing about being sad in the desert,

The tears evaporate right off your face like the desert is taking everything from you, even the salt and water from your tears, even the salt in your blood you give to the desert it takes and takes

Doesn’t think about what to leave so you can keep on surviving so it can take again tomorrow

Its harder to be sad in the desert

Hunger in the Skin and Soul

Sometimes you need to be held, 

The skin holds a hunger that can only be thwarted by the touch, the pressure of someone who loves you. 

But underneath that hunger 

underneath that layer of Mud and Stone that we call Blood and Bone, 

lies a heart, 

A soul, 

A song, 

Something that screams and howls with pain, something that coos and purrs with happiness, something that sighs and moans with pleasure, something that rages and riots with anger. 

Souls need to be felt 

and Hands need to be held