that's mrs. mediocrity to you

.

and a handle

to hold

onto

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life

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A week of up before dawn,

asleep far too late,

and the merry-go-round

keeps on spinning.

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A moment this morning

of quiet beauty,

an intake of breath,

both of us,

solitary,

reaching for

sky.

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Prepared to run, poised for flight, yet standing my ground. The sky grows dark with words that flit by with the silence of bats, words used, expelled, offered in place of all I cannot give. The earth rumbles with those I’ve yet to speak.

I want to remember tomorrow before it happens and dream of yesterday’s chance. I want to be the bird that lands last. I want to sing with the abandon of loss.

Instead, I reach my arms high and offer sanctuary, spreading branches like wings and roots like scrabbling claw feet. I am sharp-edged and hollow-toed. I am filled with echoes.

I dreamt of you again last night, fooled myself into seeing you again, but even my dream felt the need to remind me that you are gone. And even in sleep I wondered if this is the way it will always be, and I spent the rest of the night wandering lost from room to room in a house built from memories of places I’ve never been.

We were there, together, just for a moment. Before I remembered.

Mostly, I’ve come to understand that the questions will never be answered. Mostly, I’ve come to embrace the lack of knowing. I am content to wander through this field of grass and bird and flailing branch. The wind is a challenge to stay upright, my map has sailed high into clouds of disdain.

.

And we laughed again
at free falling bottles and
broken stars. We laughed.

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Joining in today over at dVersePoets with a Haibun, using Kahlil Gibran’s quote: “Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.” as inspiration.

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sags and wrinkles

still

hanging on

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Some days you have a story that isn’t yours to tell. The words add up and bobble around inside your head, bouncing off the boundaries you’ve put in place to keep them corralled. Silence fills the room like a big grey blanket. Everything is muffled, charged with static, covered over with the possibility of fog.

Today in one of those days, and all I can do is think about the ways we save each other in this life. The ways we save ourselves. The tiny little things that heal hearts, or sew them back together with crooked sampler stitches. Smiles and soup and hugs and listening. Being there.

Love is always messy and unchartered. And we are always finding our way together, bumping blindly along the path that stretches before us.

And the questions rise. How do you fit a whole life into a box?

The memories we have become a knot too complicated to untangle. We can only pull out a strand here and there and watch as it dangles. That day, that night, that violet neatly placed between the pages of a bible. Remember when? Heartache and happiness all mixed together in a jumble of once was. Love holding it all together like glue.

Suffice it to say that all we have is our story. Some of them are big and broken, some are smaller and demure. I am learning to cradle each one in the palm of my hand. Delicate petals dried and tucked away between pages that smell of time’s passing. Bits of hope gone dry and brittle, but saved, just the same.

Cherished.

And there it is, the dust of grace, gathered in the seam.

Some days you purse your lips and blow that dust back out into the world. Other days, you close the book back up again, ever-so-gently.

For safekeeping.

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the night

i showed you
the shape
of insanity

you called me a liar
and a thief

screaming your colorful
banshee derision and demanding
the return of your soul

i had no way
to make you understand

i’d given up my science
for you

walked away from theory
and formula

left behind explanation
and conclusion

i wanted to show you
my passion

i wanted to offer
my heart

i wanted to light
the darkness
with new stars

and share the pattern
love makes
as it races
through the night
from you
to me

but you
were unable
to see

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Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) was a French physician and parapsychologist. He believed that the soul could be captured with a camera, and made the capture of those images his life’s work.

Today I am honored to be hosting over at dVerse Poets with a prompt to write as a member of the opposite gender (hope you’ll join us!). I chose to be Hippolyte in love, where none of those pictures could ever be enough.

Photo (entitled The Signature of Mental Sadness) from Baraduc’s book The Human Soul, Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible.

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flies the apple

of my eye

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And happy to be there, settling in finally, after all these years.

You have to know your limitations and work them
into the fabric of your life.

Pick them apart and darn them back together.

You have to go in circles to get to the center.

All of life is only ever held together by a thread anyway,
no matter how much you want to think otherwise.

It’s a trap you construct to keep yourself alive,
even if you must begin anew each day.

You do it because survival is a never-ending puzzle,
a labyrinth, a fibonacci dream,
and you are always listening
for the sound beneath the sea.

You do it because everything beautiful
is woven of dark’s lightest threads and
every negative space holds eternity.

You do it because you’re thirsty,
and even dew on the edge of a crooked-silver web
will sustain you.

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and it’s always accidental, the discovery of light and hope and love in the midst of deep shadow. we want to be cooler than that, less trite, or at the very least, sharp-edged and angled, dressed in hard shells that cover our scars. we think that’s how to stay safe, how to survive, how to win. we think there’s an answer, when all the food is in the questions, hanging low and heavy with overripe nectar. if we’re lucky, one of them will drop just as we walk by, leaving splatters of wisdom on our long black cave of coat, and for a moment we’ll remember what it’s like to be alive (or at least we’ll forget what it’s like to be less than). the bloom is the destination and the growing is the map. have you ever seen what a tangle of thorn the rose tumbles from?

eventually it all falls down, rotten with seed and ancient mirror.

you must look
for the glimmer
of valor

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after much

consternation

she decided

to go with

the scarf

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