Wonder

Thrust forward
into the unknown.

What carries us though?

How do we rise each day
and move with such agility.

I'm not sure how I breathe,
eat, walk, see or hear, how my heart beats,
let alone write my way through
this manuscript.

What is talent? What is the muse?
Why do we have to make art, create
businesses, produce culture, perpetually
shape our world?

This morning is full of
questions.

This morning you are too far
away to share in this conversation
of wonder.

Transparency

Monsieur, when you pull away after an event, trip, workshop, conference, when you say, let's just be friends, or let's take a break, or suddenly stop writing erotic notes, it is clear you are pursuing other interests.

How can you not know of the transparency?

With your worldly desire for encounters, I offer you up without complaint to your pursuit and conquest.

When it ends I may not be here, and that's a risk, but you don't care at departure (you have your eyes set elsewhere, mon cher).

But then, somehow I remain.

Only you could not know the complexity underneath, the way resistances and acceptances flow chaotically. Loyalty, consistency, these are crucial, yes, but, ultimately love rules over everything.

You are a good man, Monsieur, and you love me, I know that.

In your absence I don't stop loving you.

Explore

I explore the configurations of desire in a mutable world of connections.

Glare

Shades of love
in an over-bright world.

Is love ever found
in the glare?

Possessive

Monsieur, stop! I have never laid
claim to you.

Nor shall I ever.

No, I've never said, mon homme, mon amour, you're mine.

What a strange idea, Monsieur!

How opposite to the way I am. Impermanence rules!

Fever

As if a fever broke.

In the shower, warm water pouring over me but as if I came in from the storm somewhere out in the wilderness. The steamy fog unrolled itself and you found me sipping morning coffee and we talked.

Of uncertainty and even though decisions were made I felt they were also being unmade and that endings were beginnings.

Can the paint on the canvas be unpainted? Or must we whitewash and re-paint? Will sandpaper take it off? Could I sand myself to an essence, a place of blank openness, the untouched whiteness of the beginning?

Forgive

To forgive is not to condone, to allow the same behaviour to continue, the patterns to play out their relentless rhythms.

I forgive myself.

For being there: for being hurt or hurting.

That is all we can do.

Wild Heart

It is so precarious, day after day,
these inner desires, meltings,
flames.

The Mirror I Don't Want to Hold Up

Do I pick men who can't make a commitment, unattached, single, deliciously attractive, brilliant, because then I don't have to?

How many years did it take me to learn how to spell commitment? It was the word I balked on, always. Entrapment. Then I had to become liquid and be what he wanted.

Commitment is a deep promise.

Not ownership; not possession. I can make a deep promise to love you unconditionally and with futurity.

Whoever you are.

Culpable

In what ways are we culpable?

In what ways do we cause the events that befall us?

How often do we set up situations that implode and then we can disappear back into our lethargies. Perhaps whining; perhaps blaming; perhaps only sad.

If I look deeply at the words I spew forth I find hidden pins, off-putting things, tiny hisses and flashes, not quite the blinding spitting snake, but almost. Or do I exaggerate?

Sometimes I prevent myself from having what I most want. It's a determination against myself.

What can I say, Monsieur? I am a complex woman.

Trapped

I am trapped in my own fears, fears which disperse and vanish like fog in the gleaming sun when confronted.

Fears don't like to be faced: they hide; they lie; they rationalize; they obfuscate.

Like insects fleeing the light in the night on the counters of an old kitchen.

Insomnia

When I decided to obsess about writing the way I do a lover, I stopped sleeping. Now I keep my notebook with its empty white sheets beside me to write blindly in the night with a pencil without looking.

Words that flow in the symbolic between the imaginal and the real.

Reflecting and shaping.

All day, euphoric and tired,
such nights of intense love-making.

Sea-breaker

It was a small sea-breaker, Monsieur. But love flowed over it.

An ocean of love that could not be
held back.

The trail, Monsieur, is a decoy. It does not reveal my whereabouts, or my perspective. I could be elsewhere in the terrain where it is dense and dark and dangerous. You would never guess from my notes and messages. I could be escaping from our field of connections, and yet appear to be available, even stable. If you could know what maintaining these appearances cost you might be surprised.

But this is how I deal with my capricious interior.

Even with falling away, I remain close.

There was a moment of confidence, but it's gone now.

When a writer leaves that many spaces between paragraphs, I find it threatening.

What's in the white spaces?

Is it a white font of writing that curses us? Hidden writing that... She talks under her breath, muttering, blaming; I hear her the way one hears the ocean in a seashell held up to one's ear. In those spaces between the blocks of black words.

Especially when I see virid and cinnabar feathers lying about, and can hear the swishing of the endless sea foam beneath her squawking, the way she belittles us.

She left too many spaces between her paragraphs,

and they encroached.

Dreaming, Monsieur. All the muscles enclosing the head, redly, dark eyes staring out. It reminds me of wounded and healing. Then I saw your face like a carnivàle mask of clouds floating, and emptiness, the void itself, where your eyes and open mouth.

A burqua of white around my head, the snowy landscape. The purity of the whole unbroken light, its whiteness.

Did anything change?

I don't think so.

Once she was back in her unkempt house, where she was looked after until she regained her strength, the tirades began again. She said she was living out of a dumpster which was of course ludicrous. She lashed out at anyone who was younger, brighter, more beautiful. Which was most of the women in the world since she was old and on the decline.

The black habits continued. Dark and flapping with a cane at the seashore, she looked like a nun. Except for the florid red lipstick, the crimson suede gloves, the cherry red French lace petticoat under the thick layers of black burlap when the wind blew.

Driving me home, you softly asked, 'I'd like to lie naked next to you,' and I thought how warm and comforting. Only when our clothes lay on the ground you became fire and I melted into liqueur, hot sweetness all over you.

When we drove he kept his hand high on my inner thigh. Did I like it? Of course I did, Monsieur.