life is a flywheel life is a perpetual motion machine life is a charger I need electricity bitch!
October 14, 2022
Tag: poetry
When your skull rattles on the hamster wheel and You can't tell your feet from your shoes and they Have you down for A sign on the dotted line to feed your Family a hand-me-down meal, 'cause if you're Going to survive you're going To have to make it Work, make a home, make a life when work Is home, work is life, when An honest day is honestly an Act, a head long follow through Of just enough until some fragile moment pulls you off the manic round about and you forget why and remember for whom, forget the whine of the wheel and remember a shared meal, remember that it's not the hanging of the hat but the hand in the hand, that the tunnel is only a vision and the check the means to the end of the day, that nothing we build will last beyond the graveyard shift, when you remember what it's all about, when you remember Love.
September 3, 2022
i need air to live so does that mean air is a part of who i am a sort of periodic relationship with symbiotic elements of stylistic sub luminous human consciousness still wet behind the amniotic when time's up! a fluid creek without a cause way out across the surface of a high tension wire drawn to this fish bowl soup of a life or is it all in my head?
September 3, 2022
Start with: maybe it's not about me. quiet morning ritual, open to possibility. contemplation. stillness. a deep breath, diving in to: maybe it's not about me. open palms letting go softly considering without judgement without shame radiating outward into other moments another time in a place not yet known resurfacing to breathe with you in awe and wonder maybe maybe it's not about me.
June 8, 2022
why does emotional wreckage haunt us? (i'm always at least a little bit lost.) we move so fast but do we go anywhere? or are we like trees, rooted in our lives. two seeds encompassing separate universes of potential become two trees in separate universes, both uncomplaining subjects of their places in the world, of their microclimates, of shade, sun, elevation, weather, competition for water. they don't get to choose where and when damp soil awakens them any more than apes decide where and when to be born and into what precarious social networks. it's the agony of choice that defeats us moment by moment, the mistaken belief that no roots bind us, that no walls block out the warmth, that the open sky alone determines where our reach meets its limitations. trees feel no grief, no loneliness, no despair. they endure. they live, they grow, they die. they fall, they sift into soil, decay. or are we discrete organisms at all? or are we only entries in a bestiary manufactured by the neural pathways left behind by natural selection, by those primitive shapes that fell one into the other, by those coincidental keys that opened coincidental locks, those streams of particles flowing through the skulls of self-considering apes, electrical entities that can't see backwards into space or time, only inwards, the master originators who declare this pool of signals suffering, enfolding it within a length of judgement, this is wrong, a sin, a fault, or this shall be excused, ignored, elevated into grace. trees make no such distinctions. fill in the spaces between the branches and the tree becomes negative. whatever we are, we exist, we need. one moment of joy, one moment of grief. we pass along the dendritic stream into an unreachable sky. (suffering dislodged from its context is never senseless.)
May 30, 2022
life is pain, suffering, confusion, disappointment, impermanence. death.
it can’t be fixed, changed, redirected, repaired, improved, perfected.
life is unfair. it can’t be made fair, equitable, just.
to believe otherwise is an illusion.
we still have moments of choice. pivotal moments.
but they mean less than we think they do, less than we hope they do, less than we need them to.
you can forcibly change the narrative. you can fool people, fool yourself.
but you can’t fool human nature. it goes on without you. the rest of life on earth goes on without you. the universe goes on without you, continuing to expand long after you and your politics are gone.
make peace with it.
make peace with your life, your vulnerabilities, your illusions. with all the needs you can’t fulfill. with the happiness you can’t achieve, the failures you can’t explain, the successes that didn’t ease your despair.
let go.
listen.
be humble.
even if you don’t understand, right now, in this moment, be still.
take a deep breath.
to be alive, to be human, to be conscious, is to suffer. so rethink your assumptions about suffering. about pain, about confusion, disappointment, impermanence. death.
let go.
step down.
bow your head.
you can’t understand it all. you can’t control it all. you can’t make every right choice, or even know what every right choice is.
in the end, it doesn’t matter.
you will suffer. you will die.
i suffer. i will die.
everyone we know suffers, even if it’s alone, in silence. and someday they will die.
in light of all that, what really matters?
what matters to you?
May 15, 2022
Sometimes when two people each have half of something, you don't get a whole when you put them together. Sometimes you still have two halves.
May 14, 2015
The wisdom of the winding path is that there are no shortcuts.
June 7, 2020
by Elijah M. Newton*
The woman in white dress lives in the hole walls come in groups of four I’m sure the man in the mirror told me so he wears my face not me my face like Halloween but children love Santa more. Mother says boys behave rewards are given Mother wore white and was ladylike Father was gone told to look in mirror to find him Mother never made sense. Money is found at the bank had a roommate once a frog perhaps poured peroxide on my hair Chicago now Albany frustrating really it was bleach a total mess the mouse laughed with me he wears a top hat lives in hole with woman in white. They’re married I think. Virgil lives in my veins pumping through my heart like faucet feeds the hunger to share secrets are meant to be kept it’s ok to share dream though. One day words being hard to find he came out the mouse not Virgil told me he was magick magick exists in the minds of children pure imagination left me. There was a potion was not free but mice don’t need money he was after my heart cheese “NO!” shouted me at the mouse ran no scurried to the hole haven’t seen him since. Woman in white is nicer whispers to me at night darkness hides things 'specially secrets. I love woman in white reminds me of Mother she told me great many things but Mother made no sense woman too. Work is work not meant to be fun friendly woman at bus port smiled I liked that wanted to make her steak that night steak comes from cows live on farms went there once a park too. Woman didn’t want steak I didn’t like that decided to make in-spir-a-tion She lives now in between the blue lines pen broke can’t clean stain from carpet broken useless it sleeps now in dumpster. Sat at the desk wrote until the sun woke up long page I felt better went to work work is work boss told me he needed more from me “I’m poor not much to give!” shouted at him. He didn’t like that it wasn’t my fault. Told me “start making sense can’t understand me" “im not Mother. Mother she never made sense. Father left money.” this confused me but he gave me number to magick woman just mouse in disguise offered me potion capsules. I don’t take them can’t afford them mice don’t need money. Persistent ran home but he beat me there now in mouse body with top hat smiled at me reading my paper. Snatched from his tiny paws hated it told me so I believe him me too kept paper though told me so offered tiny hand in important task. “Mice don’t need money! No cheese, go home tell woman in white!”
July 4, 2020
* Originally an unfinished short-fiction piece reformatted by Ajax.
Why do your keys make so happy a jingle on a dull day in March? like a puppy dog at the door, welcome! welcome! it's a good day! hello! you're home! Forty-eight years old and I slouch with my knees apart like a cowboy if a cowboy was a middle-aged woman in artificially distressed denim and dirty hiking boots. What's important? Love and art. Forty-eight years old and I swagger with my wallet chain chiming against my box-cutter like spurs ching! ching! like a cowboy if a cowboy was a rejected product of the unraveling American middle-class. When did I last watch the sun rise? decoupled from time and space because it can't be rushed, can't be squeezed in between errands and dishes and feeding the cats, because there's no app to replace it, because every single one is unique, because it'll never come again. Forty-eight years old and I sigh when the weight of old pain and everyday grief feels too heavy on my back like a cowboy if a cowboy was a bird-beaked old woman trying to do the right thing without a guide, a tutor, a mentor, a helpmeet. Who am I isn't a question I can afford to answer when nobody is good enough to earn a living. (The interest would kill me.) Forty-eight years old and I'm finally the person I wanted to be at fourteen. If I'm invisible it's because I choose to be invisible. If I put up with someone's shit it's because I choose to put up with their shit, for love or money. I don't have to, I choose. I survive. like a cowboy if a cowboy was more than an old-fashioned symbol of self-reliance, independence, substance, courage, and strength, more than a man whose character, in accordance with stereotype, was honed by adversity, a man who doesn't care about the show but about the story it tells, a man who understands that it's not about the having of it, but the earning of it, a man who lives in no man's shadow, a man whose cares are etched into every line on his face, in his limp, his swollen joints, in every gray hair, every wrinkle, every mole, a man who doesn't complain, but keeps on walking, keeps on working, a man who shapes his life with his hands, if a cowboy was an American ideal that even a forty-eight year old woman can aspire to in a dusty dry-room shifting banana boxes from one place to another. It's not that I wanted to be a man, it's that I wanted to live up to masculine ideals.
April 3, 2022
