Driving into the sunset, the angle just so the world drops. I could change my name to Thelma if there was some one to hold my hand. Wings on the water, devils and angels on the radio. Me, drained and ready to take the back road. While enjoying the ride, I forgot to drive. I don't like this road, it's too fast. Everyone else is on it. I can't see the sun set anymore. Hurry, hurry. I get off of that road. I mosey. I dawdle. I take notice. On one corner I see a Father and his daughter wait for the light to change, she laughs as he playfully yanks her arm, her backpack pushing her hair forward. Next corner I see a young man in a wheelchair ready himself for the bus, his expression is not one of joy. I imagine for the next few blocks how his days will be in the winter months coming soon. I see teenagers cuddling on benches, elder dog walkers and many kids walking home from school. So much more happened. So much more. I get to keep those sights, sounds and smells. They are mine now. I took a drive.

I don't care what sins I have committed, how negative I have become. I just want him back. I want him. I am so cold. I don't know what to do with my hands. They have no place, no pleasing. I have never been good at pleasing people but I could always please him. I am not pleased. I am not warm. I don't see colors like I think I should, the way I remember. I remember sweet breath and brown sugar. Now, it is open air, no where to be and no hurry, no hurry. I feel such shame for having ever wished away a moment of a day, a week, of my life. That wishing was wasted time that could have been better spent with him. He never knew. I know. I could have loved better with him. He loved best with me. I live best when I love. I still want to love him. I still want.

I have been thinking about knowing. We only know what we know and stick by it because, well it is what we know. We, here drive on the right side of the road, our vehicle's have the steering on the left. Is it better? Is it correct? It is what we know. Recently the entire territory of Samoa switched to driving on the right side of their roads to the left. In mid-morning, traffic stopped, every car, truck and van changed sides as a group and life continued. Now, they know something new. Different. How to possibly know what we don't know? We never ask the questions because we never understood how much we never understood. We stay mute. Dumb. Driving on the same side of the road because it is all we have ever known. Is it the brave, the bumblers that happen down the other side? Crash in their example but blare that once, the once in this one and only lifetime that they took. I have been thinking about steering. I've been thinking I need some directions......

I am incomplete. The reason I ever wanted to come back home, open the door...has gone from this planet. My Bun, The Bun is dead. He died not in my arms, but alone, in a veterinarians cage. Poked by needles that did him no good. Bruises. Holes. Scars that will never heal. So limp he was a half life, while I held him and kissed his dry lips and whispered in his flopped ear "I love you the most, I love you the most, I love you the most" for the last time. My body doesn't know how to feel, I've left something behind. The gas is on, the water is running....no, no, no. My reason, my tangible soul is nowhere. I may never dream again.

I have Morrisey's "The More You Ignore Me" playing over and over in my head. So what am I ignoring? I know for sure it was my laundry. Getting to it. I need to clean out my top desk drawer. Mop the floor. Transfer hard drive, balance checkbook, get in balance, find a doctor, find someone that cares, care a little less. Will it scream out my name, in the dark, in the night, and when I sit up in bed all alone like so many other nights, will it be there? Close, closer. I should drive. I should drive until I don't know where I am and the opportunity for distraction is stolen by fear. Then I couldn't ignore anything. Not even myself.

Lying on the floor with a piece of shit arm, wondering what is the purpose of a blog that never gets read? The ol' tree in the forest and one hand scenario on my laptop or just my fragility needing? Needing validity. Waiting for epiphanies to pour in as comments as well as posts. Plug up the slow leak in my soul as I feel it ooze in conversations when I am able to say less and less. I expect to find parts of me in the shower, washed away, clogging the drain. All I see are tangles of hair. I am tangled. This net is a dumping ground for the naked body and the stripped searched mind. I just never thought thoughts were waste.

All the galaxies we ponder are no more. The pulsars have shifted into new matter and the white hot dwarfs have formed clouds of the future. We will never see it. When we look out, the light is going away so we know we see the past. The past is reaching us, in our now. Our now is barely touching. When our sun dies, we won't see it, we will never know the type of life to extend beyond Earth. Can a thought carry on? Energy quiver, ripple through the dust and riddle of space..the actual space between spaces? Will it hold worth? Will it know of its intelligence? I can wriggle my toes in the green grass, hear the ducks chase and quack over my head, but I don't see the future when I look. Everything has happened before. I am now. When will I shift with the red and happen to be?

The average man who does not know what to do with his life, wants
another one which will last forever.
-- Anatole France

Suppose an infinity of insecurity, indecisiveness and surety of no
destination. The destination is to never have a destination.  To never
end.  Why hope for this?  Why do we ponder away this whole life, that
we know is here, now?  I will freeze with the joy I have, so full,
brimmed with this life only too aware that it will all end.  I stop.
I barely breathe in the middle of a gust of glee while the knowing
and the ease smash into each other, showing me how uncompr-
omising reality....is.  It rolls on my tongue.  The most delicate of
flavors.  I want everyone to have a bite. 

How do you show what you are made of, what the sum of time composed? The width of your ass, the amount in your wallet? What to show? Make a list, crack the code you couldn't break in elementary during tag, during recess, after school. Pour out your spleen to every one you brush against and listen to yourself cram for the exam of being a person, being somebody, that matters. How can you show the work when you don't know the answer? Who grades it anyway? I never looked at anyone else's paper. Why need to show mine?

Oh, the relief of not being a man. For if I were, I would have to know rage. I have never known it. There is a stopping, a stopper built into me. My makeup. Is it my feminine? Is it my sex? I can say the word hate, but I don't know it. Hate is the heaviest word I know. The weight to carry with it, will bend you beyond the measure intended by uttering, conceiving. I have tried to hate before. It is not worth it. The hated never gets the benefit of your pain, your desired wrangling of despair. Men project the rage of anger/hatred outward by use of fists/guns/tanks/bombs. I have lived a life surrounded by guns. I could hate them. I could. I am relieved to not have one in my hands. I am bare armed and fearing the machines of war being built up all around me. And then I wonder who I am when I suddenly want to punch?

When a four year old asks "Who finds me if I'm kidnapped, if strangers take me," how can you possibly answer in any way that he could understand without scaring and scarring him? Not you. The police, sure. The FBI, they are the police for special bigger badder scarier crimes. He can't conceive of why he is asking. Why he could be taken. He knows of strangers. He has said hello to them. He knows never to go with them. He knows to scream and kick and fight and hit and scream and scream. But still he wants to know. But still he wants to know what they would do to you once they have you. But still he wants to know why they would want to take him, why him? Why is he still asking? But still he knows there is danger. But still your voice quivers as you try to answer in a way that might calm you both. It doesn't.

Some people wear scents. Some wear them as a shield, a warning of their approach, a lesson to take notice of them sooner. This is not a scense of their self, this is a cloak, a covering. They don't want you to know who they are, they want you to think of them in this particular way ; musky, fruity, clean, freshly picked from a garden or manlier than any other man. My mother wore a scent all through out my youth. It wasn't garish or over powerful, it was how she smelled. I have associated her with that fragrance nearly my whole life. She could take a shower, be clean from soap and still have it under her skin. I would lie on her chest while she talked on the phone, then taking her scent with me. It was in her hair, her closet, her purse and the car. It became part of her makeup. I could lie in bed and be nearly asleep only to wake up by her smell as she passed by in the hall. When I was 10 years old, she was taken hostage in a bank robbery. While I was waiting for her to be released from the vault, I was waiting for her with my hands pressed up against the glass door of the neighboring drugstore, my eyes shut. I wasn't looking for her, I was smelling for her. My memory is in my nose.

I am weepy, this bending Willow, weighted by circumstance and the chance of place. Placement. Where to be, where to put the feel of my self and the lack? I am bending ever downward so far the sky will only be seen again if I were to be on my back. If religion is nothing but geography and genetics is your destiny then the place mat on my kitchen table will hold my dish waiting to be filled, but my stomach cannot stomach anything I have to offer it. With a dry mouth and eyes that won't stop leaking all their secrets I long for a time when time was the promise and green was. Green was. For now I Weep. For now I am bent, and the shade I give my self will not last.

Where does the green of envy start its creep? The insecurity of place rocks us loose in our relation to all relationships and forces us to shake our fists at the sky when things crumble, as they do. Is all security illusion? Is chaos the rule? Is the secret that there is no secret? Wishing for the wish all vanity and ego, the gulp and grab of humanity. Who said happiness was attainable? Just a right. Right is just and written down, inked, penned and read aloud. So how is it gotten? Is it gotten? It is a flash while driving alone at night, the cold breeze forgets your death, all that ends. The frozen second of the long note. A strawberry. Laughter in a movie theater. Then silence, and waiting, craning to view any scene. Launching, perched to pounce on the slightest glimmer of gladness. Did you bring some for everyone? Is there enough happy to share?

I feel small. Cosmically, yes, I am aware of how tiny a dent, the pinprick on eternity I will be. But here, today, in my own apartment, I feel so small. Who is to measure the size of a life? Friends, family, society? Is the purpose to have purpose? Small enough to be let go, flung. Small enough to miss days, weeks of daylight and have no one wonder where you've gone. How to be big? Big enough to burst open doorways, shine to a squint and keep the revolving molten core out, out never to be doused? How big is enough?

It is late night, early morning in between Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the inauguration of our 44th president and I keep thinking about the ideas some people have expressed about the ability to control your environment. In effect, affect it to any outcome you wish. You wish for wealth, you focus on wealth, you will have it. You wish for health, you focus on health, then health you will have. If this is so true, then the reverse would apply and each negative, or seemingly unasked for encounter would in actuality be desired. The blind seek blindness, the deaf seek not to hear and then the argument takes the turn to where I can no longer bend my reason to see. How did a public turn so ego-centric as to assume that they can and will control the entire Universe as they will? They influenced all forces to induce tsunamis by uncontrollable negative emotions and therefore deserved to be swept out to sea with the village of their birth? Women seeking firewood to cook there sole meal asked for, stood up and requested by their negative impact of being on the planet, to be raped by 13 armed rebels on a pile of corpses from the devastated village? This is reason? This is cosmic, worldly, godly justice for being a human? If only those black Sudanese women had felt higher and better things, thought better, they would not have been tortured. If you produced higher vibrations the universe would place in your hands all that you desire, if only, if only. No matter how high you vibrate or how positive the words you speak float from your lips and touch that strand of energy between us all; death will come, bodies breakdown, atrocities will happen and ones you love will disappoint no matter the investment.

Being human is being imperfect. Being alive is not knowing what is going to happen next. Thinking you want what the Mountain holds gives you no right to remove its top regardless of the surroundings. We no doubt affect each other and can affect our own lives, but to think you are the center went away with Copernicus and the discovery of the earth revolving around the Sun, not the Earth being the center of the Universe as people chose to believe. There is a whole world, a whole Universe swirling around us. If you refuse to notice it, no wonder you think you are the whole. All that is left with that philosophy? A big empty.

Is a Rothko art to my Brother that coos like a baby when he holds a Rock River rifle in his hands, marveling at its craftsmanship? Is a fragrance art? What about two people maneuvering through downtown traffic on their banana seat bikes, heavy woven caps and unrelenting smiles breaking and beaming brighter than the winter sun? Is that art? Loving, no holds barred ...... the dance of all you are, a grace. How to classify which medium to measure your art? Is art the pleasure or the sharing? Both?

Once again, I'm not sleeping and the hurt is spilling over into the front of my mind and blurring my focus. The holiday has come and gone. It was wonderful to be with the people I love and I know value me for how I am and who I am. Bursts of understanding, these flairs of truth just spark me into this ultra reality and oddly calm the underlying dread of never being able to untie the knot I have tied to a person, for nearly my entire life. Now finding how they were wriggling and manipulating the knot to choke any chance of understanding how little, how small I was no matter how much I gave. For give is all they wanted to see from me. If I wasn't giving, the math was wrong. No wonder I add to subtract. I add. I add. This has only subtracted from me? That can't be. I must have more because I gave more. Pardon myself by pardoning others. I deserve more than leavings and scraps. I deserve more.