Complications: Lines, Etc.

Where do we draw the line?

They all seem so intent:

one must be drawn

somewhere, somehow.

There's pride from

layers of history

too ancient to be stripped.

There's hair, and how to treat it.

There's family: gone or glue.

There's running the risk of erasing

essentials

in being lineless.

Yet these lines, lines,

they net,

confuse and prostrate.

They seem so silly to me

But I know they mean something to you:

you (oliveskinnedburkad)

who have something to lose,

and me (blondeblueeyedamerican) with nothing to.

________________________________________________________

My ancestry doesn't sizzle.

It doesn't scorch when touched

Doesn't recall ancient hollows

from gallows.

My ancestry doesn't create longing

Never had to fight for it

So never had to fret.

Your pain is a current event

Newspapers haunt and stir you

To action, frenetic and frantic.

While my identity stretches back, static.

Beginning to Pray

Here I am God

This is me:

Standing on a curb,

calling out an unknown name.

People come and go before me

look left, look right.

Dreaming of touches, curled

and days without sky.

I watch conversations flow

instead of geese fly

I see my fingers move

though they're not sure of what they write.

Here I am God

This is me:

your intrepid seeker

your muffled mapper

and unsure friend.

Thoughts' recycled ebb & flow

wears

No, this isn't it.

In my mind, there are worlds where

thoughts are thunk and

sleep is slept;

I explode

and we connect.

Here I am God

This is me:

my secrets gone

before you,

my heart a decipherable tome.

I like to think of it as cluttered,

I like to think of you as home.

When What is, is What's Not

The other night, I saw a prophet and had a thunderbolt revelation. As I tried to hand a homeless man a bag of food, truly from the depths of my heart, I realized my hypocrisy and my ugliness. Shame washed over me: I saw that there was nothing that I could actually do to help this man. I saw that, cruel truth though it may be, in attempting to help him, I was doing many unhelpful things. The very act of charity degraded the essential dignity of this man...as a human being who is past childhood, it is an unnatural thing to be fed by someone else. My attempt to give him a dinner, while perhaps kind, highlighted the fact that he is not respected enough by society to be able to feed himself. No, more than that. My charity was symbolic of our society's rotten foundation. I never felt more helpless than at the very moment when I tried to help this man.

Another thing that resulted from this crazy night was a heart, sickened, unable to console itself, unsatisfied with the way things are. My heart beat, disgusted at itself because it was this night that I realized that I am just as much accountable for the way things are as those people who actually made the world this unfair by virtue of existing within the system--I am what makes the system unbalanced, girls like me who have every advantage in the world and no real worries. I saw in a flash of horrible insight that all the things I was doing that night were more about making me feel better about the plight of the masses. Charity all of a sudden became revealed for what it is: a way for the "us"es of the world to feel better about the way things are.

I withdrew that night, losing my usual optimism. I'm not sure how to describe this to you. Really, it was the kind of night that I can't talk about because in so doing, it becomes about me again. Which would be untrue the story. The story's about me realizing how little of this is really about any of us, we the groomed and fed, even as we have a created a society where it's only the "us" that has any value. It's about something that for once did not have any sort of subjectivity and was simply just what it was: the truth.

I do not know the name of the man that I approached. I do not know his background or how he came to be standing on 9th Avenue, right behind Port Authority, or who had affected his life up to that moment. All I'm sure of is that there was something in his voice when he answered my own ridiculously, patronizing and politically correct question of "Do you know someone who might need a meal tonight?" was frustration and weariness. When he replied, "Yes, I do. That man over there [indicating a well-dressed person] or how about that woman [a lady similarly well-dressed]? Everybody in the city needs food." He was so frighteningly honest, so frighteningly unafraid to look me full in the face with his golden-brown eyes that were so surprisingly void of emotion or accusation, those eyes that just looked straight into my soul, that he shocked me into realizing that I know nothing. None of us do. We assume, we take advantage of, we project. And I realized that we are the only creatures who could have created a world where an act of love could actually turn into a selfish one.

I'm sorry.

Addison Rd.

When I loved you,

Peace came easily.

Sunshine lit my vision

Almost as if my heart

leaked through my eyeballs.

Summer was endless,

a state of mind only I knew.

The future, frozen.

I felt scooped up, cherished and whole.

Everything I said was funny so I knew I was best.

When I loved you

Peace came easily

(and life was held at a painless distance.)

An Observation on Searching

We're all looking for climax,

the high point in our stories.

There are bursts of moonfire every day.

It's not yet, you say. Wait for it, you murmur. Wait for it.

Meanwhile, life happens, trammeling or trumpeting.

Haunted Hotel

WellhowisitthatItellyouaboutthatonetimewhenIwasinaroomsofulloflovethatIfeltimmobileat itspassingsuffocatedandsurroundedbyafeelingofmemoriesandtvshowsandknowingthatroom wasemptynowbutstillfeelingtheimpactofhappiness?

It's called haunted. Haunted by love.

Parabola

When life is sinking toward a sine,

Making a deep and swollen pool,

Threatening to undertow,

And you can't breathe for the

Pulling,

Remember this:

that its curve is,

naturally,

Up.

Demon Days

Realizing I begin a lot of phrases with "maybe" and "so"

as if I don't have the conviction

to set my sentences free on their own

And seeing that life

is one exhausting process

because it's never knowing

what comes

next.

How could you?

And perhaps not knowing

could give us strength

if we wanted it to

but it's more usually

a crutch for weakness,

a soft place for my "maybe"s and "so"s.