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a couple months ago I'm out behind the gabled house with dregs of home still seeping through its edges, a sharp sort of newness ripping the seams of who I am & who I was, sweaty fingers slipping from between each other with the bloodied grasp of desperation - it is a spring day, and I am here again. the leaves are new and the blinking infant furled in the strands of my chest takes a breath and every time I trudge through these vine-ridden woods I feel her grubby hands trace the creases in my ribcage. there are ghosts here, the soulmate-friend across the ocean and I and the way we'd take axes to the already-fallen trees like our anger was spraying away with the bark and we were left with only breeze. there are the phantoms of our hands stuck in the mud, ripped leaves beneath our fingernails as we unclogged the flow of the creek and watched the water dig its trenches deeper, and now i'm watching it capture the light of a new year in my hometown alone. through the leaves and over the tinny chorus of water-on-rock I hear the echoes of a mother calling to her children in a game of hide-and-seek, her children laughing, the clamor of it like a memory captured on tape and played back. there is a hole here, radio waves rippling through years folded back and punched through, I a bystander to the reminiscence of a stranger years down the line when some part of that laughter will be lost. it is here. it is here now, in the backyard of a house I sometimes call home.
8h ago
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just found this track on spotify and i think it's just beautiful, speaks about extending yourself to someone and letting fear just be, not letting it control you but not suppressing it either. it really speaks to my life right now, trying to be genuine for someone without overwhelming myself.
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Your fingers laced in mine like five tourniquets,
stopping empty words that flow from my empty nervous lips, your fingers like tourniquets.
I'm enjoying the silence like this, i can hear the sound of your lips as you read me Robert Frost.
And silence cross fades into a bliss that has stuck with me this week, the sound of Frost on your Lips, "Not Even The Rain" you say as you read me E.E. Cummings.
I read Kevin Fitzpatrick yesterday, he talked about reading poems to his partner Tina, she was moving to a farm in Northern Minnesota.
A tourniquet is that look that you give when you're right where you're supposed to be, and i know there's so many places to be. And i've never met someone who is at so many at once, even sometimes gracefully, even sometimes gracefully.
Gracefully, you tell me about New York, gonna see Bruce Springsteen on broadway, i kiss you in some Portland driveway, you say sorry for being so many places at once, you wanna feel grounded with me,
I say i don't wanna be your rock i want to be your sea legs
If you move on will you at least give me a five star yelp review so i can be friends with your friends, my collar for your tears, my sleeve for your snot, a bout of crying as you tell me about fear of loss and giving
which leads to loss
which leads to fear
making it hard to give
your fingers laced in mine like five tourniquets, stopping words that we'd forget, i won't forget that look that you give,
tie it above the wounds, i've had a rough month or two, you're like my sea legs. making out in some Portland Strangers driveway, gettin dizzy as we stumble the long way to my house, the feeling of motion as we lay still in my bed and you read me Frost and Cummings and Elliot, the feeling of motion as i lay still and you show me:
how to put a moment on a page, i hang some pictures up at my new place you light the sage, your spirits lift the room higher and higher i let some dire feelings of loosing you burn with the sage i put you on pages and pages of moments and moments
I got nothing to hide, you tell me about your friend Joseph who see's through peoples lies.
Sometimes you hid behind your eyes
making it much more potent when i see right through them, and i see right through them
I let fear of you moving on burn with the sage, i put silent moments of your tourniquet fingers on the page, and i listen to your breathing and the sounds of kids playing at the school across the street as we lay through the afternoon. My collar for your tears my sleeve for your snot, some happy crying as we leave behind fear of loss, only giving, which led me here, in your arms, without fail, over moments and moments, and pages, and again only moments which lead me here in your
Dec 25, 2024
I read it in first grade and it accelerated the development of a profound sense of consciousness and independent thinking and fortified my existing love for animals/nature/the environment. I was already an overly existential child and it helped me learn to focus on beauty and joy in the face of death and suffering!
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The leaves were falling from the great oak at the meadow's edge. They were falling from all the trees.
One branch of the oak reached high above the others and stretched far out over the meadow. Two leaves clung to its very tip.
"It isn't the way it used to be," said one leaf to the other.
"No," the other leaf answered. "So many of us have fallen off tonight we're almost the only ones left on our branch."
"You never know who's going to go next," said the first leaf. "Even when it was warm and the sun shone, a storm or a cloudburst would come sometimes, and many leaves were torn off, though they were still young. You never know who's going to go next."
"The sun seldom shines now," sighed the second leaf, "and when it does it gives no warmth. We must have warmth again."
"Can it be true," said the first leaf, "can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we're gone and after them still others, and more and more?"
"It is really true," whispered the second leaf. "We can't even begin to imagine it, it's beyond our powers."
"It makes me very sad," added the first leaf.
They were silent a while. Then the first leaf said quietly to herself, "Why must we fall? ..."
The second leaf asked, "What happens to us when we have fallen?"
"We sink down. ..."
"What is under us?"
The first leaf answered, "I don't know, some say one thing, some another, but nobody knows."
The second leaf asked, "Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we're down there?"
The first leaf answered, "Who knows? Not one of all those down there has ever come back to tell us about it."
They were silent again. Then the first leaf said tenderly to the other, "Don't worry so much about it, you're trembling."
"That's nothing," the second leaf answered, "I tremble at the least thing now. I don't feel so sure of my hold as I used to."
"Let's not talk any more about such things," said the first leaf.
The other replied, "No, we'll let be. But—what else shall we talk about?" She was silent, but went on after a little while. "Which of us will go first?"
"There's still plenty of time to worry about that," the other leaf assured her. "Let's remember how beautiful it was, how wonderful, when the sun came out and shone so warmly that we thought we'd burst with life. Do you remember? And the morning dew, and the mild and splendid things..."
"Now the nights are dreadful," the second leaf complained, "and there is no end to them."
"We shouldn't complain," said the first leaf gently. "We've outlived many, many others."
"Have I changed much?" asked the second leaf shyly but determinedly.
"Not in the least," the first leaf assured her. "You only think so because I've got to be so yellow and ugly. But it's different in your case."
"You're fooling me," the second leaf said.
"No, really," the first leaf exclaimed eagerly, "believe me, you're as lovely as the day you were born. Here and there may be a little yellow spot but it's hardly noticeable and only makes you handsomer, believe me."
"Thanks," whispered the second leaf, quite touched. "I don't believe you, not altogether, but I thank you because you're so kind, you've always been so kind to me. I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are."
"Hush," said the other leaf, and kept silent herself for she was too troubled to talk any more.
Then they were both silent. Hours passed.
A moist wind blew, cold and hostile, through the treetops.
"Ah, now," said the second leaf, "I..." Then her voice broke off. She was torn from her place and spun down.
Winter had come.
Sep 8, 2024
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I have many Ideas. I ponder over them like an obsessive collector; organizing, re-organizing, packing them into words so the meaning is captured, transferable. Most of my transformative experiences are unexplainable - how does one capture the depth of a still, silent night? The whispering of leaves in warm summer breezes. Vague feelings of wholism while sitting in the grass, photosynthesizing like plant ancestors - a fish swims without direction. Many call it god but the church is alienating; the word massacred and butchered beyond the recognition of what it once meant.
One idea I have kept unmolested by the opinions of others, is that these holistic experiences in nature, with friends, live music shows, where the pulse of life beats strongly, are everything. An anchor point for a life well lived. It’s not enough to just be in nature, alchemizing the circumstance missing the key ingredient. A couple of friends and I went on a trip to where the ocean went on forever, unbroken horizon. We were down by the water, sunset and glistening, warmth of the sun and sand beneath my feet. But it was nothing more than looking. I did not have access to this other way of being - locked out, truthfully, by being eaten alive by the stress of exams and stewing in the feelings of being unlovable. It is somehow within you; the trees and ocean reflect it back to me. A quality of self brought out by sincerity and solitude. It’s everything, reflected in everything worthwhile.
Apr 17, 2024
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because i’ve been trying to be more intentional with my time and it made me feel something so i sat with the feeling for awhile before opening my notes app:
I see bears playing pool in the window on my lap in some faintly-brushed dimension whose green felt I’ll never touch. There’s an echo of a lyric in my head (“you don’t have to leave, you could just stay here with me”) that somehow stretches past the incidentals of whether the words are true in fact & makes them true, somehow, a hand pushing through some clotted veil to let the light of all those days ago pass through, when I thought all I had to do was have the right argument. prove a God to someone who left Him long ago. now it’s a light in my chest, this thing I argued for, and a hint of a cicada (just its shell) on a tree, & sometimes I am clawing through the dirt with all my friends who can’t see that their fingernails have not been clean in so so long. For all our digging we can’t stop looking at the stars; for all our looking at the stars, we can’t stop the linoleum lights flickering above the pool table, for all the chapped lips and fraying eyeliner and all our tiny scars we skip where we can and push our way through the rest.
8h ago