the second poem i wrote about you

the truth is, i don't want to write about you

perhaps it was easier when you were a secret
curled tightly against the line of god's palm
i could look at you and see nothing
but crazy hair and a belly
never suspecting the gold in your veins
the delight of measuring the curve of your skull
with my fingertips

i just assumed it was because of
1. 876 days of celibacy
2. ovulation
3. the moonlight
4. the scotch
5. the clouds and
6. the shy cat perched a few feet away just wanting to be petted
that i wanted you to kiss me

i didn't realize god was opening his hand

until
i saw you walking in the garden
sweet and lonely
and i thought
"oh fuck."

The first poem I wrote about you

Maybe I will write a poem about you

I hate my uterus. Part IX.

Whiskey and cigarettes. For when you can't stop crying on the laundry room floor.

Fuck, I'm turning into my dad.

Oh Neruda...

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

~Pablo Neruda
Read more: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/xvii-i-do-not-love-you/#ixzz1Bqf1j8nv

Misadventures with Little Cricket in LA

TUESDAY
a sign turned around backwards
the other side of magic, a blankness
a splinter in my heel and an overflowing toilet
the beginning of 150 hours of confusion, but i didn't know it yet

WEDNESDAY
disconnection
unrelenting pain and the constancy of painkillers
no reaction to my touch
no light in his eyes
light in his eyes i couldn't reach
drinks i couldn't afford
trying
him reading the darkness in my eyes
an open wound of mystery

THURSDAY
a three hour black-out in the city
despair while dancing to violins by candlelight
giving up
a conversation erasing a stranger
an unexpected question
finally getting really fucking high
cautious optimism despite all evidence to the contrary

FRIDAY
meditating in the hollywood hills
looking for a labyrinth and finding his childhood church next door
a moment with the divine in the oldest part of LA
the unknown closing of his favorite japanese restaurant
the making of plans
not quite being able to let go and dance
never having any idea what he was thinking or feeling
the unmaking of plans
knowing the final nail in the coffin was coming

SATURDAY
the disappearance of the one thing i really wanted
giving up
deciding to go "home"
no flights out
2 o'clock and the rental car agency closed at noon
trapped in LA with a fucking stranger in the decrepit house of his godmother
chain-smoking outside a shopping mall
wondering if i was going to have a psychotic break
my credit card being turned down
him buying me a book about time travel
almost being hypnotized by the power of my dreams
answering imaginary interview questions
realizing he was a gambler with a heart of gold
realizing i had taught a gambler with a heart of gold how to play poker
recognizing the storm of optimism we'd been caught in
finally beginning to see him
the beginning of friendship
the reappearance of certainty
not wanting to be seen
wanting to be near him
never knowing which one of us was a kaleidoscope

SUNDAY
alone in LA
falling in love with a pair of sphinxes
taking pictures of the shadows of art
dancing by myself in the living room
a drunk dial filled with laughter
him returning to me
openness and playfulness and sensuality
how things were supposed to be
an unripe avocado, a broken fence, and spilled wine
"don't worry, it's just a symbol"
never knowing if we actually kissed
not being able to see him see me
shit i didn't want to be reminded of
a doorknob falling apart in my hand
a roller-coaster in a house of mirrors

MONDAY
waking up and hating myself
going the fuck back to sleep
knowing what he was feeling by the music he was playing
connection
feeling like he was my husband
marked by sadness
waving good-bye on opposite sides of airport security
crying while the plane took off
crying while the plane landed
a 9 month relationship poured into 6 days

choosing love over fear and walking into the heart of an enigma

Who said that love was fire?

Who said that love was fire?
I know that love is ash.
It is the thing which remains
When the fire is spent,
The holy essence of experience.

~Patience Worth

Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton...!

"What is serious to man is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as 'play' is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in the mysterious cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch the echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat, when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts, or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the 'newness,' the emptiness and the purity of the vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

"For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

"Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join the general dance."

~Thomas Merton

What I meant to say was that I want to fall in love with you very, very slowly

No one has as absurd a love life as I do.

NO ONE.

Northern Lights

The experiment in celibacy is becoming quite interesting. I just watched a show about the sun, and I think I more or less had sex with the universe. Or at least the solar system.

I'm going to need to see the Northern Lights.

My body constantly wants to eat the universe.

Somehow this week I am finishing up grad school (again), starting to fast for Ramadan, and moving out of my place to escape to the country. I'm oddly calm about all of the Major Life Transitions that are Happening Right Now, but that could just be the denial talking. There is no furniture in my house except for a mattress on the floor and a decrepit book shelf full of old bank statements and art supplies (mostly red). The majority of my belongings are in piles on the floor, usually right next to empty boxes, but not actually in the boxes. Packing everything I own and cleaning the place in two days while I am not eating for 12 hours a day should be easy, right?

This Ramadan got off to a weird start. Actually it got off to a perfect start, since it began last night. I was having dinner with H. at Mother's when the sun set, which was lovely and in some ways a great encapsulation of how this transition is going. Because who else, several weeks before she is about to move across the country, more or less falls in love with a man with muscular dystrophy 18 years her senior? NO ONE. (Well, H. might know a few...) Ah well. I love longing and mystery and the universe kindly showers me with an abundance of both. It is very interesting to know him right now, as we are both going through Major Life Transitions. He is buying some land outside of Austin to start a holistic health center for folks with MD. It feels like there is something else at play in us (re)entering each others' lives at this particular moment.

Anyway, the weirdness of Ramadan was this morning. I couldn't sleep last night so I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading about the holographic nature of the universe. Then I started investigating how I could spend some time at Esalen before I settle down in whatever my next hometown will be. I finally went to bed at about 4 am, only to wake up two hours later to try and beat the sun. So I went to McDonald's. MCDONALD'S. I started off my first day of fasting with MCDONALD's. After which I promptly fell asleep on the couch. Fail. Damn you, enchanting holographic nature of reality.

The rest of the day was a blur of almost-but-not-quite packing and finishing up things at my internship. I had my last meeting with my fabulous supervisor Inga Larson, during which I started to feel the effects of not eating for 8 hours. Since there was not much food in my house for dinner, I went to Central Market. I'm pretty disorganized when I shop anyway, so you can imagine what it was like on a very empty stomach with little sleep. There were no straight lines, no lists, just the chaotic tracing of nutrient-deprived neural networks back and forth across the shiny floors. There was actually something strangely interesting about the experience, watching the impulse to snack on the cheese samples, being utterly distracted by the smell of fresh coffee. My body constantly wants to eat the universe.

Fasting started to get quite amazodelirinteresting around 6:30 pm, when my brain really started to shut down. I was increasingly delirious in my house without furniture, stumbling around piles of clothes and empty boxes, trying to talk to strangers from Craigslist who really really really want the last of my belongings. At some point I became fascinated with the pile of half-filled journals I have accumulated since high school. I thumbed through them in a reverie, feeling like I needed to DO something with them, but unable to figure out what. One of them was empty except for the sentence "Everyone needs a pet monkey" and a list of peoples' addresses from 1995.

At some point I did a little latihan and started cooking dinner. Cooking actually helped me feel more focused and wasn't as difficult as I expected. And then I felt normal again. Simple as that. So normal that I am now drinking tea and smoking cigarettes at Spiderhouse (fail). So normal that I am concerned I will stay up again all night reading about holograms.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

There were fireworks on the day I decided to leave.

So, I've decided to leave Austin. I've decided to leave Texas.

Yeah.

I haven't really caught up with my decision yet. Every time I try to really think about it, I just get...ellipses. A blank space filled with something uncertain. A shade of disbelief.

Who am I without Austin? On one hand that is an easy question to answer. Wendy, Wendy, in love with eternity, in love with mystery, in love with the unknown. On the other hand, my whole adult life has been in Austin. I wandered in as an insecure 19 year old and turned into...exactly who I want to be when I grow up. The process has been unexpected, miraculous, heart-breaking, boring, lonely, beautiful, amazing. It has been full of laughter, full of play, full of beautiful humans, full of shit, full of disappointment, full of music, full of magic, full of dancing, full of intoxicants, full of hundreds of broken expectations, full of lanterns, full of crystals. And full of God. Most definitely full of God.

A part of me wants to separate out my experiences from Austin. There was my first love, a crippling depression, some bad decisions about men, groups of friends coalescing and dispersing, countless drunken shenanigans, a handful of miraculous Flipsides, the revelation of God, the discovery of what I want to do with my life. And it all happened here. Austin.

There is no way to separate it out. Austin was the background.

In a way, that is what Austin does. Every year it takes in thousands of young folks and watches them while they wander around having fun, bruising their knees and hearts, until they finally stumble upon the truth of who they are. It somehow keeps them safe, ever watchful but gentle, never too heavy-handed. People float in, thinking they will only be here for a short while and then years pass and they realize they don't really want to leave. Austin was only supposed to be a temporary stop, until I got my degree and moved on. Which is, basically, what happened, just fourteen years and three degrees later.

I don't think Austin lets you leave until you are ready.

And I am writing this at Spider House on Independence Day. Outside on the patio, under the Christmas lights, drinking sangria and smoking while I write, write, write. Spider House and Austin, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. I almost can't think of one without the other. How much time have I spent at Spider House writing? How much time have I spent at Spider House in general? When I first came to Spider House I used to write in my thick black journal about how fucked up I was, how ugly, how no one would ever love me. I wrote most of my papers as an undergraduate here. I remember staying up late into the night, writing a paper here about Kabir and sound. We came here on my 21st birthday, and I ordered a Shiner an hour before I was officially 21. I still remember the bartender looking at my ID and hesitating before she gave me the drink. I also remember getting overstimulated and climbing under the table that night. Natalie and I came here the Monday after our first Flipside. We sat in silence, holding hands and crying. There was this. And this. An evil, narcisstic ex-boyfriend used to come here every day and ruined Spider House for me for a couple of years. But I came back.

And now I am here, thinking about leaving.

One of the things I have learned in Austin is that I am not good at good-byes. I used to think that leaving was easy, that I could walk away from that apartment, that job, that lover, that friend without a backward glance, without a pause, without feeling a thing. Only to find myself astonished a few days later when I couldn't stop crying. Now I know that I have to honor all the endings in my life. I know I have to process leaving and that I am going to cry and feel like my heart is breaking and that this is completely okay.

So, in the next six weeks I'm going to go to all the places where my heart has broken and stare at them. I'm going to go to all the places where my heart grew and transformed and take it all in. Many of these are the same places, so that should save some time. I already cried today thinking about Sculpture Falls, breakfast tacos, and the Texas sky in the summer. My friend Laura said that I shouldn't let my grief convince me to stay. It is an adventure.

But how am I going to live without the giant-ass Texas sky in the summer? Especially when it was full of fireworks on the day I decided to leave.

You there, reading this poem by robert martin

I,
the consciousness
that I am,
eternal,
indestructible,
the consciousness,
that cannot be burned,
or cut, or marked, or wet,
the consciousness that can travel
at the speed of thought,
the consciousness that is already there,
the very consciousness that says:
there is no real time, or space,
there are no limitations,
the consciousness that says:
you are made in the image of God,
to be Godlike,
the consciousness that experiences,
itself,
unfolding,
unto itself,
by itself,
for itself,
the sacred expression,
you there,
reading this poem,
you are the very one,
I address,
saying:
I see a light.
and by “I see a light,”
the I,
I am talking about,
is “you,”
I see a light,
a tiny fragile, beautiful bubble,
of light,
floating in emptiness,
and it sees me,
and in dancing,
we move,
into the other,
and it is the universe,
and I, can, see,
as if,
standing on the edge,
of a football field,
looking out,
I can see—
end to end,
top to bottom,
side to side,
post to post,
this tiny bubble of light,
full of movement,
spiraling, and spiraling
unfolding,
unto itself,
by itself for itself,
this galactic expanse,
life,
full of expectation,
I can see the majesty,
I see the sacred expression,
and it sees me,
and we dance,
and we move,
into the other,
and we dance,
and we move,
into the other,
and I am it.
and I am it.

Read more: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/you-there-reading-this-poem/#ixzz0sPJ1DB4f