Paint Swatch “Gypsum” [10-01-23]
Category: The Self
Steaming Kettle (07/27/2020)
I gather pinches of various herbs and flowers from their various jars and packets.
My mood today is out-of-body; distant and detached.
I open the tap, filling the fat hollow of my kettle with the cool water of the well.
My days have been blending together in a slow rush of sunrises and sunsets.
I have cravings that can never be satisfied.
I smell my earthy fragrant mixture, stimulating something deep within me.
Lavender blossom, chamomile, raspberry leaf, rosehip.
Valerian root, orange peel, sage, mint.
Most from my own garden.
I need something: a physical touch. Intimacy.
Violent passion and passionate violence.
I watch the honey drip from my spoon and pool in the bottom of my mug,
Which reads “Pretend this cup is the skull of my enemy.”
Gods, what would it feel like to be a warrior again?
To know the feel of a man again.
To bathe in blood, instead of the crisp waters of a spring.
I use an old shortsword to stoke the embers inside the old wood burner,
As my kettle finally begins to whistle and scream.
The boiling water in my mug creates intense clouds of scented floral vapors,
The taste of which does something to clear the fog of my mind.
Winter (Frostbite) (12-23-2019)
The Winter Solstice is upon us, and the year is in its dark half.
Days and sunlight have been steadily waning,
while the moon gains power and the long nights reign supreme.
I am like that tonight heavy darkness inside.
I wish to cut like ice
Burn like the cold
To be filled with anything other than this nothing.
I want to scream like the wind
And fell cities like fallen snow.
Why can’t you understand that sometimes I am Winter?
Still and dark and sleeping and alone,
My blood a frozen river,
My nails clawing like naked branches,
My teeth need to tear flesh like the sound of crunching snow.
I want to bite at you like the frost,
Make your breath pour hot into the air like a dragon,
Get your cheeks red.
But you can’t take the heat of me,
So, I only hibernate.
And it hurts.
Late Night Thoughts 1 (5/19/2011)
“The moon is full,
and so are my dreams.
Silence is deafening,
and madness wakes,
always howling answers.“
Bathtub 02/15/2022
Ode to a New Journal [7.02.09]
Like a lover, passionate and familiar;
I will fill you.
Like I have so many others before you.
You give me butterflies.
I think about you
when I’m not holding you open
between my hands.
I miss you
when I’m not caught between
these soft pages
And the rough tip of my pencil.
Are all of you my asylums?
Forming crazy words and ramblings
On tens of thousands of blank pages.
I think I’m held captive in these lines.
My entire life scrawled and thrown down
In graphite and ink blots
For people to decipher.
Haikus about being overwhelmed (9-15-20)
I am overwhelmed.
Being pulled all directions.
I am exhausted.
I’m going to hide under my bed.
Don’t get enough sleep.
Schoolwork has taken over.
Too much stuff to do.
My attention being spread too thin.
Clutter baring down.
There’s too much junk in my house.
My life needs cleaning.
I have too many things in on my plate.
Grief [8-1-18]
Today I drew the cards
And they told me that to flourish
in my writing, and in my life,
I need to allow myself to feel my grief.
Because it withholds me,
Cripples me,
Retrains me.
That I must stop concealing my pain.
Stop hiding my broken emotions.
Stop hiding my sadness.
My loss is my power.
My devastation is my fuel.
My anguish is my battery.
My trauma is my fire.
To use in my writing, and to write about.
But it hurts.
It takes so much out of me
To put so much of a broken life on paper.
I blanket and hide and conceal and distract
So my heart isn’t heavy.
So I can sleep at night.
So I can find happiness in the things that used to make me happy.
I have been told that I am a pit of misery,
So I stopped, and became something else.
But apparently I need to shed my skin,
And allow myself to feel,
To heal and move on.
The Sound of Loneliness [3-12-19]
The sound of loneliness is
The lighting of a cigarette.
The noise of an all day Netflix binge.
A dog snoring in my bed, instead of a man.
The sound of loneliness is
My own voice thinking aloud and giving me pep talks.
The turning of pages in a book in dim light,
The shuffle of my feet as I pace across the floor.
The sound of loneliness is
The ignored notification dings on my phone,
And the clicking of keys as I text someone who doesn’t answer.
And audio books I don’t have to play through my headphones.
The sound of loneliness is
The tickle of a fish tank filter,
The soft rumble of its pump,
And hearing my parents talk in the next room because I moved back in.
The sound of loneliness is
A car pulling away,
A plane taking off,
A call being dropped.
The sound of loneliness is
Being sent straight to voicemail when I call,
The silence after I say “I love you”
The beating of my heart,
The taste of the salt in my tears.
Reflections [9.27.08]
It is nearly noon here now, and we’ve already been up for awhile. Breakfast was fried eggs, freckled and warm from the coop, covered with salt and pepper, and crispy greasy bacon to dip in the bright orange yolks.
We spent fifteen minutes in hot pursuit-meaning he ran around the barn, appearing and disappearing, while I gave chase and tried to shoot him with a bow and arrows.
I am at ease here; the fridge is full of milk, the yard of wood for the bonfire tonight, and my head with thoughts of petroglyphs and praying mantis, and the sex we had on our knees on the wooden floor of the kitchen earlier.
The majority of today I’ve seen behind the lens of my camera; shiny blue glass electric line bulbs. Yellow argiope garden spiders with abdomens the size of grapes. A feisty horse. A teething puppy. A hayloft whose drying onions were illuminated by sunlight through windows.
My mouth tastes like hot coffee and cold mint tea. Hand-rolled cigarettes and semen. Fried eggs and the beer I gargled with when I woke up this morning.
AEL Library & Archives 