I feel unbalanced, but the salamanders make it better. These little dragons have never let me down. They could be beneath any rock but I choose the one that they’re lounging under. Today the camera allowed me to see what my eyes couldn’t – bright blue bug eyes. To be that close and gaze into these eyes is like coming home (the the old house). This connection is a seed that Mother Nature has planted in me.

Whatever…

Your sky is beautiful.

-written 3/24/2007

It touches me like velvet
brushed against skin.
This woody darkness caresses
me away from the world.
It kills the constant
tick, tock, ticking
of mechanical wheels.
In the patches of
grey and white lace,
I see the moon’s cryptic patterns.
They flow over stone and sparkling snow
to rest beneath soft evergreens.
This silence of the mind engulfs me
and with every breath curls
up my spine.
Deep within I sense the awakening.
The opal snake uncoils and connects me.
The shock of remembrance holds
and binds me in transformation.
My body becomes taut and is
played upon by these fingers
from a life I have never
lived so wholly before.

written 8/22/94

Sisters are needed. The blood sister or the sister of the spirit or the sister of the soul; it really doesn’t matter. But among women, sisters are needed because women tend to look at themselves very critically. This is what they’ve been taught; through school, through society, through a mainly male-oriented role models. That’s not to say that the male aspect  isn’t needed. I think there needs to be a balance. But women today tend to be so lost, so far from their power, so caught up in things that do not grow; things that suck at their life root, things that are illusion in truth but seem so real because so many believe. Sisters are needed always, to see through our defenses, to see the light that’s in each one of us and to know that that light is shared with every woman. This makes me pause and think about my mother and not having that essential woman in my life. It used to enrage me, used to make me feel like I was missing something, but now it just makes me see that more than one woman was needed to guide me. The feminine in every aspect of my life has been there even though my blood mother hasn’t. Women came and left my life mysteriously, as it should be, just when I needed them, just when I needed guidance, a council. That’s why sisters are needed; sisters that help each other create, sisters that see into darkness with their own light. That’s a lot of light. That’s a lot of stars. Then there is the knowledge of knowing that those stars, that cold light, is infinite; is never ending, is never beginning, is right here, is in this moment. So find your sister or let her find you. It isn’t a question of wanting it to happen, it’s more about accepting it when it will happens. It’s a natural cycle that has always been. Peel away the outer layers and get to the fruit, nothing else has quite as much importance. A hard space to stay in, but sisters are needed.

Weeping the past away we walk a worn path
to call the dead from their sleep.
The pulse is strong and stained with tears.
It falls like feathers through the womb of time.
The bass notes create the fading threshold,
no one can escape, no one can hide.
We are led in a trance flight
toward ourselves and into the void;
moving passion out of time,
without beginning, without end.
We are in the void, light as a note.
We exist only in this note.
More people come in one by one
and stand transfixed.
They didn’t know why they stood there.
Eyes all glassy and doll like,
flesh tingling over weak vibrations.
It comes through on a pane of grey eyes.
Her gaze turns like a hawk in flight and dives
in wait for the next inspiration.

Written 2009

I was a dog, obedient and faithful to them.  I took all their jabbering and rules for truth.  I snapped at their words as if they were table scraps.  My masters told me not to stray from the light, “be a good girl and you’ll go to heaven.”  They told me I was lucky to have a roof over my head and food in my stomach.  The four walls that surrounded me were clean and white, but the pink blanket they gave me was old and fraying .

I finally snapped between the pledge of allegiance and the 10 o’clock news.  I was tired of heeling, sitting, being humble.  They found me, three days later, crouching among the blackened supports of the old church.  I must have looked like a wild thing; matted hair, dirty, and half starved.  A mere shell of a child.  After that my parents promised to give me more attention, a pat on the head or maybe a nice treat, but it didn’t last.  Their jobs and social gatherings were more important.

Then on July the fourth just before the fireworks, I told them about the voices.  They were like little pinpricks of sound that squeezed themselves between the scolding nuns and my classmates’ name-calling. My parents stood and stared through me, not at me.  Dad hit me and mom gave me the Bible and a speech about Evil.  They made me say, “get thee behind me, Satan.”  when the voices came.   The voices never stopped.  I just stopped telling them.

When I turned fifteen, the voices became tortured screams.  I would sit at the dinner table and listen while I shoved lima beans or tuna casserole in my mouth. Mom and dad got a divorce then.  I was put in a home until the courts could decide who wanted me.  There was a lady in a crisp lavender suit who came and asked me questions.  Her glasses were always sliding down her nose.  She asked me about my parents; “did they hurt me, did they feed me, did they love me?”  I told her; “once, yes, I don’t know.”  She stared at me like they did and then asked me about the voices.  I didn’t answer.  Finally I said I didn’t hear any voices, “just some screams in a nightmare.”  The trial came and went but no one came for me, so I lived at the Home for Lost Souls.

Three years later they pushed me out the door and said, “you’re old enough to find a place of your own.”  That is when the voices stopped screaming and began to speak to me.  They would tell me to be strong and not to listen to lies anymore.  They comforted me when I was cold and hungry.  I found a job at a used book shop on ninth street.  The owner found out I was sleeping on the street and was kind enough to let me stay in the basement of the store.  I would crawl in through a ground window and sleep among the stacks of old books.  It reminded me of school or the Home, but it smelled better.

I would go to the diner across the street to get a cup of coffee and wash in the bathroom.  The waitresses never charged me for the coffee and they always slipped me some leftovers.  With the money I earned at the book shop, I bought clothes, candles, unfiltered camels, food, and brandy.   By the time I was twenty I had read Shakespeare, Shelley, Yeats, Poe, Kafka, Stoker, V. Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, and Lovecraft.  I’d sit on the overstuffed couch and read all night.  The old boiler and brandy kept me warm.  The words, like black crosses, soothed the voices.

I knew most of the waitress’ names and sometimes, when they were busy, I’d help them out.  I’d refill the endless cups with hot coffee, maybe deal out a few cholesterol sandwiches, or empty the ashtrays.  Suzy told me I’d make a lot of money if I started waitressing, but that wasn’t for me.  No one could get me in those ugly pink and white suits.  And I could see how hard it was to shut down at the end of the shift.  They would sit inhaling nicotine and caffeine and empty their dirty aprons of silver and green.  No, not for me.  Besides I only wore black, in reverence to the voices.

The next day I stuffed my savings, about three hundred dollars, between Byron and Bukowski.  Then I brought  a backpack, some new clothes (black of course), a cassette player, a few tapes (Tom Waits, Morphine, and Bauhaus), and the usual booze and butts.  That night I got a one-way ticket to New Orleans and left at midnight.   The shiny bus coughed smoke and screaming kids all the way.  I was glad for the tapes and books I could jam into my back pack.  When I arrived in New Orleans it was raining and very warm for October.  The streets were littered with beads and empty plastic glasses.  There was a sweet rotting smell and my army boots stuck to the pavement as I walked.

A funny thing happened as I walked away from the bus.  It felt like something was pulling at me.  I turned to watch the people spill out of that silver beast. ‘It was over,’ I thought.  Suddenly something flooded over me.  It was a need to leave behind all that had been my life.  Nothing could make me forget the pain and fear of that life, but to break those connections would mean to die.  Maybe it’s for the best.  Just leave all that with the hard plastic striped seats and little reading lamps.  Let the bus log my experiences away in its compartments, I don’t want to keep them anymore.  I turned and somewhere deep inside of me one voice rose above the others and that voice was Lily.

Written 1998

She is the most beautiful constellation.
her hair is a Van Gogh gesture,
her eyes are two mysterious black holes.
She knows the spaces between reality and dreams,
weaving ephemeral threads at lightening speed.
She doesn’t worry about consumer mentality.
Instead she concentrates on the marrow
that lies in the pages of her mythology.
She doesn’t have to gather her strength
because she knows how to let go;
to float effortlessly above the world’s
expectations of her.
She is a divinity of one.
Her self is her own.

written 2/10/07

When you see an object you observe its size, shape, form. You can pick it up and turn it around of flip it over. Flip it over to this side or that; this is a duality. Suddenly you have a choice between one side or another. So to help you decide, you look at the differences or similarities; you compare. In this comparison you begin the journey to your perspective. No one else can see from your perspective. As you continue this journey, you see how these sides become extremes. There is so much more in the between, but that sight takes more than eyes to see.

To see the between you cannot use logic. The left brain is the doorway to the spaces because a surrender is required. An inner sight of form is to see these spaces because we trust there is something more, other. Some way to see both sides at once. It hits you when you feel the expansiveness of your sight. You sense you are not alone in this discovery.

I have never had a strong council of women in my life. This stems from the inabilities of my mother to pass on our traditions. Because of this gap, I went to the eternal. Mother Nature.