Category Archives: Poetry

Tantrum

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Free Bing Photos

Free Bing Photos

Dear Master

I have a bone to pick, but it sticks in my throat an old fish bone I keep eating with no hope of digesting. There’s no point to the rant I offer you. That’s what makes me wring my hands with an emotional wash that still smells of fumes and fish. I know the answers you’ll give me to every question I could ask. So why ask?

Knowledge is a devil if there ever was one. Gives you comfort while it steals your security in endless mind games you can’t stop tricking yourself with. How could you fill my head with all this knowledge of who I am? Light and gold. Miracles and love. I look down at my costume and want to rip it till I’m naked. I can’t escape my frightened thoughts that burn me in a lava flow, erupting in my brain and filling my mouth with an eager malice. I used to know myself, but now I can’t seem to rid myself of a woman with a lunatics thoughts. You could have told me in the beginning that ignorance was not only bliss, but a quaalude cocktail that would’ve left me sleeping; a contented mongrel in a sewer heap that knows no better. Now a youthful, hungry anger boils in my belly and it’s more bitter than death no matter how many times I swallow it down. But there be the rub, lassie. Poison is best drawn from a wound and all wounds must be opened to cleanse them of their infection. And so, my mind is rent until the ugliness that hides there oozes forth for me to see. No blinking.

For love you say, as I yank at my own chain. My choice you announce and I could beat you within an inch of my own life if I weren’t plagued by the truth in it. It eats at my brain until I’m smashing the bed, the couch and tearing up my brakes in the car. Screw the red pill, Neo. Gulp down the blue pill and relish the beauty of being blind.

You should’ve told me to leave when I came through the door, Master. You should have said the price for awakening is your sanity.

Namaste,
Your currently, wretched student

Myth Makers

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Image re-posted from Art For Ever's Facebook page

Image re-posted from Art For Ever’s Facebook page

The Greeks told myths because it was easier than telling hard lessons to blind men. Stories capture our attention as whispers in a church. They break our boundaries and lull us into understanding because they speak in common images we see every day. They elevate the mundane to magic and in that transformation understanding is imparted to even the dullest of minds. We succumb because we make the mistake of believing a story isn’t real. Yet everything about a story, a myth, a metaphor is in a sense real. Because it’s not about the story, in the end. It’s about the information it delivers to the attentive ear. That little bit of knowing in tight corners is always real.

Translating life is a kind of storyteller’s trick, though it seems complicated. Death is a big ball of fire when looked at from a lover’s heart, but for the storyteller it is a page turning moment. The spot where the hero finds a boat and steps in for destinies unknown. Daydreamers are life’s minstrels. They spin a world we can understand when faced with endless events in our “real” world that make no sense at all.

Blessed are the myth makers. They breath a rich life into a chaotic world.

This is a work in progress from The Writer’s Church workshop, Boulder, CO. Hosted by Marj Hahne

Van Gogh’s Nap

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Sewer Run Off better known as The Sewer Sprite: Photo by Noelle

Sewer Run Off better known as The Sewer Sprite: Photo montage by Noelle

The quilt is for someone else. A body that will fill the space that now lies empty. Not my room and yet it is all about me, so I come here often. Shafts drift through Grannie curtains I should’ve taken down, but there’s no more money in the coffer so lace dresses up the poor girl’s pockets. The cats purr on the sills marking the territory with sonar and fur. Nothing much here, except my heart beats louder as I step across the threshold and smell the coconut verbena candles. Something of me that is good and sound lives here. Paint brushes stick out of the overstuffed closet that holds my art. Spent tubes and coffee stir sticks are meant to look neat in cups on shelves. Neat and art are antonyms, really, but I need the order in the chaos to feel accomplished, if at nothing more than organization. If the closet door is closed it’s a lovely, pristine guest room waiting quietly for visitors. But open that door and it’s color and chaos spill into the room a garden of wild flowers. My mind couldn’t be better described and maybe that’s why I come here. To see myself in furniture, folded blankets and used up canvases. The cat stretches in the sun and I lie back on the day bed in the warm pool of light, too. It is right to nap in the light and chaos of one’s creative genius. At least until the guests arrive.