PurpleSmearMetaphor

I know that sometimes I should be lying on a therapist couch somewhere and definitely not trusted alone in the shower with a razor in my hand – Wait not like that - I mean - I am not one to kill myself just not the safest with a sharp object in my hand - I should know this especially after I fell off of a seemingly innocent chair only a few weeks ago and cut open my head - I am like a clumsy menace to myself or something that I am sure could be diagnosed on a couch - with the words - “and how does that make you feel” drifting over my head.

Anyway big surprise!!! I spotted blood trickling down my leg - somehow had cut myself shaving - wow talk about bringing myself right into the present moment

Up to then I had been day dreaming the entire shower away - it is like those boring things I do every day brush my teeth etc etc – all those everyday ordinary things that I find out are more important than I think obviously as I search for tissue to stop the blood — well anyway here is one such day dream and then you will know what I mean..............


My Heart I saw running away with loves clown
Be careful I tried to say to her for the circus
With some certainty Always leaves town!!

But my mind covered it all in camouflage
And so I was lost in fog No stopping that scene Of unripe grassy green
My body was a bonfire amid plastic fruit and a plethora of apple smores
Conflagration at 3 AM amid that hole in my soul

Savoring the softness of your neck
Sweltering opus of your touch . . .
My heart interrupted with a mascara stain on her cheek
Bellowing over the bullhorn of the meek

It was not a rhapsody so to speak
“You’ve stolen it all from me.” Said she
And then it was back down the rabbit hole for me
As the rest of my body started to follow her lead.

Leaving me craving to be
Wonderful, Whimsical, wicked,
Like that white box That crazy
Lazy Cheshire cat gave to me
The one with the Stolen guarantee
As my Wonderland opened for Free

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad
to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones
who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like
fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in
the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' "
- Jack Kerouac, OnThe Road

Ok here is how I felt a few weeks ago ... wandering wounded into a day when I stopped to look at myself and realize that I was not perfect? What? I know!!! anyway ...here is a glimpse into a mind tipped that way ...

It was one of those days ,you know the kind of day I mean - unresponsive to say the least. When all my pleading for direction goes unanswered. Do you ever have a day like that? Stubbornly pointing north like a broken compass. All direction sputters out to allow life to spin in circles. A misdirection of epic proportions that ignites a hammering devastation and a certainty that can never be redeemed – a morning set in motion by a bewildered awkward reverberating careful sin from 2 am.

When I could not go back to sleep. Not completely.

Like that first day I met you - and those eyes and a smile that crinkled the corners of it all. I can still see it no matter how many years go by or where I am. Those eyes devouring my reasons with the knowledge that I hurled my heart on the ground and now what remains is only the proximity of closeness.

I trace the texture of it in my fingertips. The softness of fear in the slick surface of my sadness and the cool sharpness of a self-remembered. Detained by a love that slit me and left small slivers behind to leak regret all over the fragments of me left over until I was wrapped up and put away as a formal adult. I look into the mirror and on these days I can still catch a suggestion of a restless child. A glimpse out of the corner of my eye of what is buried under the debris of a thousand broken bottles of invented disaster. Come back here girl! But it is a useless shriek.

It sucks to know that so often I put my foot right in my mouth and still do not see it coming! Today I could hear the words I realized they were my own and still could do nothing to stop the blazing flow. Why-why-why do I say what I am thinking with no censor?

And I have been told that you cannot make someone love you “The best you can hope for is to stalk them and hope they panic and give in.” And lately I have learned that it takes years and years and years to build up trust in a relationship and then it only takes a suspicion to destroy it completely. What a waste. So those are my thoughts for today. I sat down to write some steamy erotica and fell flat. I always felt like the best part about being a woman was that I could do that no matter what. I guess not…

ok here
it goes
palms wet - mouth
dry
wait ! ok
ready push
in
gear slowly now
ok - that’s it
foot off - oh too soon
jolt forward
heads thrown
back- we
stall
ok try again
this time grinding
sounds
harsh
in our ears
laughing
hard
tears in
our eyes
hands tight
at 9 and 3
on the
wheel
almost missed that
stop
sign
hope we didn’t
dent your mother’s

new red
VOLVO

I loved you inside a Sunday
Within
carnivorous caverns
lined lemon-lime linoleum
between an appetite for blue
and a confusion of cinnamon curls
sliced upside-down
blistered by
a reverberating propensity
for orange twisted roughly
swapped
like soiled tennis shoes
awkward
like frayed yellow dog hair

Woman in a thick wind
a wind like needles
a wind like knives

a woman who is homeless
I watch her as she passes
watching as she reaches

Woman as an Icon
words collapsing silence
stripping her to bareness
fragmenting fences

barb-wire fences
her laughter somehow fills

I was a willing fatality in critical need as she pulled my face to hers and whispered to me, “Try to be quiet” with a slight smile. She smelled like citrus and vanilla and involuntarily I moved against her. She had apprehended and now held me firmly against the doorway of her office waiting for the last few people to leave. She leaned back closed her eyes and moved my hands slowly under her blouse to her stomach. Her skirt shifted slightly as she escorted me to where she had nothing and everything. Chocolate twisted hair and the mysterious perfume that was her temptation of me all morning. Her lips tasted soft and sweet, as I prevailed beneath the borders of my saturation and into the sphere of her.

She moved back against the doorframe and sighed deeply. My eyes glance toward the door, wondering if someone would come in. An early someone back from lunch maybe? I descended across her slightly salty skin. She moaned and moved under my efforts to reach her incredible breasts angled tip. Her hands move through my hair and dragged my face closer; I could tell it was becoming harder for her to keep quiet. Her hands pulling now fiercely - fingers tangled up in my hair. my teeth tightening on her full soft nipple. Her nucleus filling my whole being as my hands caressed her skin, demanding she come nearer.

My fingers seemed to glide up her thigh to the tip of her increase, and there among the moistness of her essence I entered her. Slipping slowly at first and than stronger and deeper surrounded by the ardor and the sweet balmy, wet, drenched, insides of she. My nose pressed to her significantly soaked stomach. My vagrant veneration making a precarious proposal as I move her whole body towards me. My tongue-captured control enveloped enclosed enfolded. I was lost in the shudder that moved her body back yet again to my incisive mouth. Until there was... nothing ...else! "ahhhh" erupted although I could tell she was still trying to keep quiet. We were still in the doorway and anyone who entered the hall would see us. I had endeavored to be quick but now with the taste of her on my lips, I wanted she alone.

I wanted to consume her and feel her for the rest of the day. To smile my own secret smile every time I saw her through the crowd of our co-workers, busily moving about their desks and cubicles. She was balanced now on the point of almost orgasm and an acquiescence of less ... I detained her there for a moment before I again sketch out her moist essence along the edges of my own dialect and pressed feverishlyly deeper demanding all of her. I could feel her rising and her muscles constricting as she moved faster and faster against my lips. She slowed swayed and then was opened from the inside out, as we heard a door open somewhere. Wanting more I drew her tighter but upon hearing the door, she broke away and made me follow her inside the office closing the door. Seconds after footsteps went past. She straightened her skirt and brushed back her hair. We said nothing connected by eyes in a gaze that made me powerless. I turned to go, except she pulled me to her and gently brushed her lips to mine…

Out of the pouring rain you came
green eyes like summer
spreading over my
common day

You ordered
in a voice
like bath water
warm and muted
crowded by things
most people let drain away

I brought you red chilies,
onions, green peppers
and a fat slice of
strawberry pie

your eyes smiled
you said “thank you”
laughing

And than you were gone
like broken glass
as deliberate as
Tuesday’s special
Without hat or shoes

This woman stops at railroad crossings
Sometimes she stuffs people
into her heart
Without thinking

Feminine acquiescence
Fills my stomach
Wrenches water from my eyes
Disgracefully succumbs to neglect

Like Peanut Butter
clutching too tightly to the loaf
Like WonderWoman
making a sandwich

Your eyes make me
wanna be a tea party
Shaken not stirred
But then I’m afraid
of spilling

Life is an
inherited season

a feathered friend in midst of flight
one heart swallowed
barefoot once more
not yours not
mine but
born
again

Sister you kissed me
with Jesus
half full with Joking
half empty
with Sweetgrass

I was a dialogue hostage sliced
from my mother’s womb nailed
already gasping to icy flesh
assimilated into clay
awoke in Santa Fe.

You arrived
as a mighty guillotine
cutting off thick
membranes of shame

Wearied
gnawing on mercy
ambushed with survival
I am repossessing beginnings
inviting you to name me
begging you to hold me
laughing that you
play me
taste me
know me

I am
ripened earth
09/29/02

This morning my body moved with a creaking sound so loud I jumped in spite of myself. I think it was my heart leaping and all my anger falling in hard pieces to the ground as exhausted I harvested a small piece of forgotten love.

Fragments like flowers open and fill with conception. Old hurts along the edges of my being. Blurry, so filled with the smoke of forgiveness my eyes burned with it. I looked at myself for the first time in years. To find that you have become my skin which is now worn away in places. And over the phone your voice is making raw holes in this as you asked me for your heart back. A question that is hard to answer because I bound your heart with rope as I hauled it away on that flatbed truck of good-bye. I kept it with mine until it turned into dry asphalt smudged only by passing strangers feet. Your words over the phone have a current underneath like electricity that shakes me. It lunges towards me and chokes my desire to breathe

I realize I am crying only after I hang up the phone. Truth scorches me underneath wheels of our naked honesty. As you ask me to unconditionally lie face down under my own pain. I feel sharp and clean underneath this end. Even with my teeth locked over my shame Even when the sound of my guilt escapes like a loud rooster. And yet Hope Screeches through me like long red nails on a distant blackboard and the pleasant smell of redemption is like two thousand horses on a hot summer day. I let go of my anger. I tell you I am sorry and I mean it.

So New Years Eve appeared and then went. This New Year left over caresses my weary body with hopefulness. I knew it when I saw the deer leap across the road.

My drive home had been saddened by all the coyotes inert on the side of the highway; prostrated on the alter to our god of speed. I and others accelerated our cars past them on the way to somewhere else. I did feel the sun on my face and the sensation smoldered my New Years world.

In it I encountered myself again. It was a painful re-acquaintance but a meeting nonetheless. Such meetings are advantageous or so I am told. For my personal transformation. Or maybe that is just horseshit!

Some things are hard to let go of. Even now. And the slow sigh that escapes my dry lips is what reminds me that I am still here desperately gulping mouthfuls of air. The handbook for sanity is regret

The morning feels cold and surrounds my eyes slowly squeezing water from them. Water, which turns into ice and having nowhere else to go, just dangles at the end of my nose along with my other failures.

As you took another load of your stuff to the car, It was not only the cool air that chilled my toes - But the complete lack of conversation after what we had said in the car. Like we did not care to do more.

Do we care? I kept talking wanting to make things easier for you. But it was finally this bland cheerfulness that did me in. Or maybe it was the relief that showed itself in your glued on smile as you said good-bye.
I had kept a tight hold on my mood in the steady stream of pleasant conversation all weekend and did not cry in front of you at all. Not one drop reached my eyes until the door finally closed behind you.

I took a bath trying to remove the chill from my bones after you were gone. All I could hear was my own pounding heart under the water. It was so loud I began to wonder if something was wrong with me. “Maybe I will die here in this hot bath”, I thought to myself. I guess there are worse ways to go. I kept looking at a bottle of shampoo that was overturned on the edge of the tub. Mango Passion was written across the side in bright bold letters. As I slip further into the tub of water, which I had earlier hoped would bring me amnesia – that Mango turned into an addiction.

Mango curiously delightful in it’s yielding juicy tenderness and contained so cleverly by soft skin. It is a mango passion that stabs at my internal organs and floods my obsession with its unbearably sharp frenzy. And Mango that becomes my liquid breakdown that surges over my now fruitless hands as I soak up to my neck in my own neglect. The mango succulence of woman and the sultry sweet distillation of love. The fruit of my endurance. Mango is such a messy fruit to eat. Of course you get to leave me.

Pain still young enough to move the issues into another guise. The feminine goddess of trading new affairs for old has a sort of healing power. Often as simple as waiting until another heart is up for auction. Except for a lingering in desire I am put out as counterfeit - too many relationships spent and me stranded by the side of the road for me to know how to buy it all back.

The irony for me is that all my white knight days of love and combat are over. You are not going to be there for another skirmish. And my heart is a horse now lame not fast enough to catch up to you again. The sadness of this settles over me and coats my heart in the same diluted carefulness that makes you say, “I love you” before you walk out the door. The words scald my skin and peel back a slippery sheet of resentment that suffocates any reply from me.

I hate that the love you are holding out to me is not mine. That it is missing the genuine tangible texturing of you. I wanted to ask you why you think I do not see it. But I could not find the words that would reach you quickly enough before you were gone. I wanted to scream at you about the hypocrisy of it all. But I didn’t. There is no explanation and no response other than what has already been said. This corruption of our love murders our promises and destroys the best part of us. Maybe it was all only a dream. Wanted so much but not quite achieved with your fingers tied up in so many doubts and mine with so many reasons.

The house is so quiet after you leave and I am alone with myself - my thoughts and my history. I wrote you an email this morning telling you it was ok and that although it hurt like hell I wanted our friendship not to end. It had the subtle tainted smell of giving up.

You were standing by the river, gathering feathers smiling over at me. I was thinking about how I ached to lose you. I almost reached out to touch you but I realized you are already gone… I let my hand fall back to my side and walked away from you to look at the cars going over the bridge instead. Miserable ecstasy of a weekend over, a relationship unwell, and the chill of that open door you kept wide open so you could get out of this relationship easier than me.