Cub

November 2010

If the cub can’t trust the lion, how could she trust a man?
If the one can’t trust the others, how could she trust the land?

She hunts with the lioness
and wrestles with playmates—
not yet lifemates in her early days.
With her own kind,
their paws and manes,
she learns to fight, and yes,
she preys.
Until preyed upon.
The lion throws his weight on her back,
resilient spine, until it breaks.
The lion comes over her
stifles with knotted mane,
greater mass, mass of disgust.
He overtakes the cub of the pride,
her pride.

If the cub can’t trust the lion, how could she trust a man?

I Was The Author + Doctor Friend

First, thank you, all of you, so very much for reading this page.

Whether this is your first visit to my blog, or if you've read every post, or if you fit somewhere in between, your simply opening these posts and giving my words your time is amazing.

I'm overwhelmed every time.

And secondly, a special thank you to the dozen or so of you who have commented, Facebooked, texted, and even called in response to my last post, She Said I Lived.

If you haven't looked at it, I request that you do before you read the poem below; you'll understand the context and see how the two relate.

Several of you shared with me that you've faced depression and the darker side of your selves. Knowing that I am not and was not alone in feeling that sadness has been encouraging, and beautiful.

I'm humbled to see others speak to my heart after hearing that I've spoken to theirs.

Thank you each, deeply.

The following poem is about the secondary unsung hero of my high school depression. She was my psychologist starting the week I started as a freshman, fourteen and falling in every direction.

I haven't seen her in over three years, but she's still as much here for me just by existing and living as she was when I sat in her office during my teen years. She was beautiful and kind, and she too, loved me.

My friend's sister saw her first, and then my mother, and then me. But she treated me like my story was the most important in the world--like I was the only narrator--even though the characters had already been written by other authors.
Now I see how selfish I was and how I rambled about my high school indulgences, but her investment in the narrative that came from my heart and my head and my fears--that was all I needed.

My time with her taught me that listening and meaning it is love, and means as much.

This is for her.

Fall 2009

Doctor Friend

It was one hour every-other Thursday at seven
through high school but that had almost
nothing to do with it
It started with my father saying bitch and
didn’t have a definitive end because there
was a job so I stopped
She saw me every time

I sat on a white couch with obnoxious red flowers
and more throw pillows than I could squeeze
between to sit comfortably
I stared at the short legs of the brown leather arm chair
and memorized the simple pattern of the olive green
carpet worn thin by drumming feet
There was always a Diet Coke—with a bent straw
stained by dark pink lipstick—that sat on the glass
side table amid messy stacks of notes
The walls were lined with shelves which were loaded
with volumes on abuse and eating disorders and anxiety
and they all had wordy titles
She watched me every time

She wore nice outfits because she made nice money
but there never was enough color in her attire
to match how pretty she was
She did her makeup in a way that made her blue eyes
look less anatomical and more like jewelry that matched
her diamond ring and silver cross
Her nails were always painted and cheeks were always blushed
whether she was smiling in her joy for me or grimacing with
empathy or something like it as I spoke
She sat with her legs crossed and hands folded mostly looking
quite composed and comfortable but her bouncing
foot said otherwise
She heard me every time

I shared stories of my world and received advice as it was her job
to dissect my issues and hear my joys as our lives were lived
and hour by hour, years passed
She changed me every time

For Stephanie

She Said I Lived

I'm being transparent: I'm sharing dark corners of my heart. So prepare yourself.

It was last night and I felt empty after the words fell out.

These words.

She said, "You lived. There were lots and lots of days when all I wanted was to know was that you’d be alive at 21."

And I am. But she didn't know for sure that I would be.

She was not afraid of car accidents or heart arrhythmias or fires.

She was afraid of the me alone in night hours and quiet depression.

And she didn't know for sure that there were times when I laid in the bath tub wishing I could fill my lungs with water. But there were. And times when I wished my little Bic razors were bigger and sharper and more dangerous.

I love her more than life, and the fear of what my death could have done to her was the greatest motivation to keep living.

This is heavy; you can stop if you want. But I'll keep going.

I wonder now who else knew how bad it was, if my siblings had any idea, if my friends ever thought they'd get a call from their parents telling them to come home because they'd heard from mine. Or if my teachers thought it.

Could they tell by my face or my tone or my walk that I wanted to die?

It was high school. I thought I was normal. Maybe I was.

Most of us have had seasons of dark days, when it seems that maybe it'd be better to sleep, better to fall, safer or simpler to end the breathing and breaking.

We've had pains and wished for their quick release from our bodies, their cages.

I was sad, and angry, and impossible.

But I was a church kid, a youth group kid. I wrote in the school paper. I played basketball. I ran around with the drama kids for a while.

I wasn't sitting in my room in the dark all the time, watching twisted shows or playing violent games. But I'd play solitaire for hours, and I'd fill up my journals with song lyrics and short lines--not quite poems--and pleas for someone to understand what was happening in my head.

I don't know if anyone did back then, if anybody really understood, because they didn't know.

I hid so much of what I was feeling and the blackness of my thoughts, and I read the liturgy at Mass, and I edited news stories about I-don't-remember-what. And I stayed out all night time or two, and got brought home once for trying. I drank and I cried and I wished that I had some idea of what love should have been.

I slept in the basement in the summer because it was darker.

I went to bookstores waiting for an encounter with some person who would change my life, and I thought he never came.

And really, I haven't stopped. I realize every few months that my frequenting coffee shops and book stores has more to do with a belief in serendipity and moments of perfection than it does with my inability to be productive at home.

But really, I've met him, time and again, just not the right one. And I'm doing okay.

He was down the path, and next door, and he was halfway between me and home, and he was in class, and ahead of me, and in my house, and more than once he was a friend of a friend, and in the right place for me at a moment when we locked eyes and I half smiled and probably blushed and felt something for a moment.

But I never needed them. I thought I did, but I didn't.

I could tell you what it was, but I'd rather you ask me and let me take you to one of those coffee shops and share something real, so you can see my face when I say again, "She said I lived."

Because I did and I am and I do.

Now comes the time when I make a point: I was sad and angry and impossible. And a danger to myself.

And now I'm living, talking about the days of the past, that don't hang over me anymore. Of course I experience bouts of apathy as months pass, and sometimes I fear that depression is in my head again.

But I tell you this: Despite the weighty color and clouds, through the most unstable years of adolescence, I lived.

And it was a choice.

I love my mom more than nearly everything I've ever known, and what I know because of her is that love is indeed enough. To save a person. To recreate a life. To resurrect the damaged, and make it beautiful and blessed.

What I know is that love saved my life, her love for me, and mine for her.

Because she is a saint, because she knows pain, and loss, and searing wounds.

Because she knows me and she loves me and she told me that a hand knit me together in her womb, and when I was old enough to understand, I went searching for proof and I found it, and asked that same hand to pull itself into my chest and to feel the contours of my heart and to know it. To test me and know my anxious thoughts.

And there were many.

But I was lead away.

Away from the anxieties and angers and fears and darkness.

All because of love. All from the truth poured out in screaming tears on my bedroom floor.

My mother showed me what it is to love, and she said I lived.

I lived because she loved.

I love because I live.

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."

This Is A Grace: The Chemistry of Resilience

This one's important: Open up the link and listen. And read.

Where are we standing? What is our foundation?

Do we believe the words we say, the psalms we sing?

Because the answers to these things matter, so we begin here:

Breathe.

Let's see

if we

can work.

Futile was meant to acknowledge that there are times when words do nothing for us. What do you say when a mother dies or when a baby is sick? And grandparents--how do you reconcile the aging and disappearance--however gradual or sudden--of the matriarchs and patriarchs of our births and breakfasts and parents. So words teach nothing, change nothing, but things happen.

Life moves and bends to its own will--no, a higher will--nothing within our grasp, and only marginally within our ability to comprehend.

How do you console the people you love when your desires say "Ache, only aching"?

You breathe. Count your blessings, title your stories, and serialize your library.

You say goodbyes and place low shaking hands on shoulders and spines.

It is not healing, but it is something.

I'm grasping for mercy, shreds of redemption to neutralize the sadness of all these unstitched stories.

You've got me in your sea,

Braced until the end.

We are tattered; we are salvaged.

We find something in our pain.

This is a grace.

We find in our pain the ability to heal: the chemistry of resilience. It is a chaotic enigma that is birthed in our bones and matured in our bending years of immunizations and practical imbalance.

We pull the staples from our hearts and lay them to rest with the dead, no grudge to be held at the absence of miracle.

Perhaps we call this acceptance. Others will say denial or surrender. Titles are yet irrelevant: futile words.

Benign or malignant. Terminal, stable, recovering. In remission.

Superfluous.

All meaningless in the grace we find: we were given the ability to bend without breaking, to wither without fading, to feel without dying. But we die every day to the staples and strings that hold our fringes to the tucked edges of composure.

We are master needleworkers. We just never knew.

It's hard to believe that one year ago.

One year ago we were hurting, and we still are.

We demand healing with expectation and remorse, laden with color and tragedy.

One year ago, I was finding out I had missed the last class I ever should've had with my greatest mentor. I was melting under Spring sunlight while the diagnosis was sprinkled over enameled tables and patterned carpet in a white walled room.

I still wonder what the breathing sounded like after she said it, but I wasn't there, and never saw her again.

And as the months came to us, we lost her. At least, those are the words we use.

But I don't think she was anymore lost than she ever was; she was only leaving.

It's not so easy in other stories. Not that grieving her is easy.

We do lose people in death some times, but more in age: the way in creeps into their heads--sneaky small and limber--and cuts the wiring, leaving them short-circuited.

The years do things to us, to the people we have always loved, that we don't understand.

We're something in sight of everything all our hopes had in mind.

Years make Grandma forget which of her children went to which colleges. And what their friends names were.

Years make Grandpa say things to me that I can't accept or comprehend. The time turns him into someone else, who doesn't see me as an eight year old who wants to tell him that she took her nap for the day. The time brings his cancer back, and the decade nuzzles into his spine and rests there.

Years bury our secrets, and age our children.

Years make us love more and less and strangely.

Years break our kitchen tables and fade our scars-from trees and men and scalpels.

And years teach us, not words.

It's hard to believe that one year ago...

was only that, a year ago.

This--the quick passing of time over our sorrows and memories and sleep--this is a grace.

And the words that we use in the moments between are indeed futile at the end of things. It is something more profound than what the term loss can communicate. It is absence. And the impossibility of the presence of what we had planned is more than grief, more than aching. It is numbness and vulnerability and anger and so many things we cannot name.

The chemistry of resilience: a science we learn as a result of the biology of man.

And I'll hold you now, forever I know.

We are not breaking; we bend. And heal.
We stitch and save.

So we begin: breathe.

I have no words to heal, only thread and time.

Song "Let's See If We Can" by the fantastical musicians, Green or Blue. I write to their music pretty often and am glad they're making it. Check them out on Facebook or Youtube and listen to their stuff.

And as always, thanks for reading.

A Breathy Defense of My Reckless Disclosures

December 2009

It’s ever so peculiar—

how we tend to find something new
to say about the same things
whether they are old or unimpressive
or unamusing

that we assume words addressed to
anonymous audiences are really
calling our names or looking at us
sideways

And it’s not quite right

that I told a man it’s a lot easier to tell my
secrets to a holiday card with a calligraphy
pen than to actually vocalize them
out loud

that we keep living our lives after
parts of them end—not stages like
adolescence or relationships—but
separate worlds

It’s appalling—

the way I forgot about the boy I
abandoned when we were children
and that I didn’t realize it for
five years

that I am so thoughtful of these things
in coffee shop moments
but that they escape me in exhales
and regularly forgotten motions

Yet I—we—forget

We do

Futile.

You get Sufjan, and he's a treat, so listen.

We have stories that are secrets in their own regards--silence in their tellings.

There are words we never want to say or hear or feel.

And these are such: Cancer. Love. Death. Distance. Time.

They are harmful and breaking and painful and I fear them. I do not feel safe or happy or comforted. Right now, not even by love. But that's for another day.

I'm surrounded by cancer, in the women we've lost, the men we're losing, the places we're going.

And I feel useless. I can do nothing. I can pray. I can cry.

I've done those things, and I retire in curious March sunsets with nothing, feeling nothing, feeling scared.

I do-love you-I do.

I can change the way I feel, and the way I experience what happens around me, but I cannot prevent the spinning of the earth, or dark empty breath and its stopping, or the growing of tumors.

I cannot force life to function under the realm of my whims.

To try is futile.

So I do nothing and cry and pray.

I see the astounding simplicity of who people are---

In strings and salads, running shoes, tobacco pipes, haircuts, hubcabs, VHS tapes, nail polish, name tags and needles--for creating and destroying-- and in crossword puzzles, veils, backpacks, sandwich bags, and text books.

I see truth in picnic tables and Midwestern Oaks and the conversations we've never had with the people who have always needed them most.

We see truth and we keep quiet.

And I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard.

So I won't say it at all and I won't stay very long.

There are things we ought to say, and love we ought to give.

But we are frightened and foolish.

And words are futile devices.

More from Sufjan. Listen. We can do much more together.

Widow

Fall 2009

“But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.”
- 1 Timothy 5:6

I am removed
from everyone who could tell you my name and
I am transparent
to the eyes in the room.
It isn’t that they see through some rough exterior
to the poor hurting thing inside, or that they have a deeper
understanding of me at all.
They just don’t see me.

There are children and men and women, and birds,
all too distracted
by their agendas and terribly mundane lives
to look up at a girl in a brown sweater
who is watching them
intently.

They don’t know that my hair is thinning
or that my father just discarded some marvelous shred of hope.
They would never imagine that
I am contemplating
their actions, because they do not imagine
anything.
They are imagine-less, thinking that they should’ve had
lunch at home, instead of picking up fast food
because they don’t have money to waste
on filler meals.
The man with the waist-length hair doesn’t know
that he’s wearing my friend’s favorite sweater and
the high school boy to my right doesn’t know that I
just listened to one of his favorite songs,
or maybe I didn’t.

None of them know that my whole world
is happening all at once as I sit here,
even though I haven’t spoken a word yet today.
I feel like a Saturday morning suicide that goes
unnoticed ‘til night, or even Monday at nine
when someone sees an empty desk,
and makes a bad joke, not realizing that
poor, bullied soul is no more.
I feel like I wrote a one-hit wonder,
like I am a widowed Mrs. Cellophane.
I took notice of the invisible,
then found myself alone.

The silent boy behind me doesn’t know
that I just saw him looking at my hair, and not
the mountains ahead of us.
It didn’t occur to him that, when he leans into the sun,
his reflection off the window is more
real and vivid than he is.
He doesn’t know that I just realized I am not the
only gazer in this box of silence, and
that in the moment I felt myself in his thoughts,
he changed my view
of life outside this window.

But then, he left, and he didn’t know
that I watched him walk away
or that the words he saw me write
were about—inspired by—him.
He doesn’t know that I am alone,
and that he just shattered me by not
turning, even just to see if I saw his last steps.
I would have. I would have turned.

We Knew Time (and a note)

Inspired by a summer's sleep with Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac

I had hummingbirds and refracted light for birthdays.
Life was miracles and moments that floated on whirs of backward wings.
At their beats, your beauty swept in me, and pulled webs from atrial corners
with straw bristles that pricked up through my chest to you.

I desired the endless; you asked who could say anything of us.
The stars! I cried: The stars who fall and our wishes
answer pleas for tomorrow, for more days, time.
To the stars, the birds, the colors! Magic and wonder—
Love, I was a child again on logs over streams
in mosquitoless, thin air beside you.

Those June hours ambled along like we knew time, though
it laughed us off—whimsies on the road with some dead language.
I told stories of beauty without pain, of flesh off bone,
and lost my own speech to questions novels asked: If this isn’t nice, what is?

There was Independence pumpkin pie on the bridge, on a night without pops in the sky
because the rain soaked the fuses of all the men in our towns.
We had Broadway bookstores, their paperbacks for our change and
I gorged myself on the scribble of a dream—a world where the rain kept coming.
But it slowed. And the days shortened so the cinematic light
ushered us to darkness on plazas and porches.

Without cover, we watched shooting stars in backseats and coffee shops
with fewer words between us, yet ever more beneath us.
On broken color and falling light, I wished for more time—which you spent with
ignorance of the short season we pretended to enjoy, or did—maybe.

There had been days rich with rain and walks in soggy denim
on Friday nights when I—with dripping hair—would ask you why.
Then there was Tuesday outside the speckled library windows
when the books stayed shelved: out of our hands, dry from the air.

But under hot blues, words of the published men in our eyes went out my mouth
and in your ears as July cried in the dry heat, while we sat poolside and silent.
The heat came on with hurricane breath and desert air,
then we shriveled as sprinklers spat and the backwards birds kissed us goodbye.

The summer drought sucked the color and give of our skin, which
left us to watch as it flaked and burned.
We knew time like the touch of arid rainbows,
ruby-throated, and almost alive.

Hey all, this piece was going to wait to see the blog until summertime, but today felt like an appropriate day to post it. I just hit 1,400 views, and I'm pretty excited about it. Thanks for reading and supporting me. And now I have a favor to ask: share me with someone you know. There are about 50 of you who consistently read when I post, and if each of you share this poem with a friend who you think might enjoy my type of writing, it'll make a huge difference for me. If you didn't know, I started this blog in hopes of establishing a readership to help me get published in the next year or two, and now it's time to move past having only people who know me as followers. Again, I'm so grateful that you have all been reading, and I'm humbled by the numbers.
Easy option to be a huge help: share the link on Facebook. I can't even tell you all how big it would be for me if you each got one more person to start checking back here consistently. SO big!

Let's make it happen. Have a great day everybody. Let's get to 1,500 by tomorrow!

It's Contagious

I wrote "Love Well" last week, and now I'm thinking about doing, aging, living.

I think this might be what realizing you're middle-aged feels like on the worst days.

They made a statue of us. (Click and listen.)

The kids I grew up with, my parochial school friends, my high school classmates, and my first college roommates and neighbors: we're mostly waiting to graduate in May.

Some of us, I think, have been looking back at the last four years, the last twenty-some years (yes, our whole lives), and wondering how different we could've been.

If we had made relationships work.

If we picked different schools.

If I kept playing basketball.

If I hadn't gone on the stage.

If someone else had picked me up from the airport.

If I hadn't gone to Sonic on a Saturday afternoon last Spring, and if I hadn't missed that last class with Elaine. If Tom had started the car. If grandmothers were always caught when they were falling.

They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault.

And if we weren't so jealous. If we cried in our laughter.

If we made different homes, were given different homes.

If I never wrote a poem.

If we couldn't dream about the things we didn't ever do.

How different things would be.

All those ifs...

They've got years of experience.

I fell in love with some music a couple times, and made men's faces the mask of those sounds. It was never really love.

And I made close friends--the best friends-- even the ones that weren't very good at it. And I wonder what it would be like if somebody in an office had thought that I'd fit better in a different room when I was 18 and in a new place.

What wouldn't have happened. The laughter, pictures, car rides, kisses, drinks, tears, poems: the adventure.

The life I wouldn't have had. I think there's a plan. I believe there's a plan, always.

I was meant to unlace my shoes and give Coach my uniform back.

I had to wear that flannel dress with rustled hair on the old LHS stage before the remodel and be kissed by John Proctor--his Elizabeth.

I made enough bad choices to get out of town--a spring break preview of life away from my life, then first to camp on a chance. (The girl had a fear of small boats. These things happen.)

And I learned what summer romance was. It was beautiful for a little while.

Then came Fall and there I went--to university Septembers and Colorado mornings. And it all came together.

And it's contagious.

A year isn't so really so long. You don't realize that when you're young, until somebody tells you. I had no idea until my mom said so at Christmas, but now I think I get it a little bit.

When you're twenty, a year is five percent of your life. When you're eighty, five percent is four years. That's almost as long as I've been out here. In sixty years, college will seem so small, like the years are starting to now.

So a year's not so long. And four of them like this--it sure was something.

We fit life into them.

We're living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers in the pages.

We're looking for something bigger than the things we've done and the things we didn't do.

Where we are right now isn't just about what lives we've lived or what choices we didn't make, which are really choices we chose not to make.

We're looking for answers of who we've proven ourselves to be and what comes next.

If there will be statues of us.

If the relationships we missed come back around.

If we'll be in these places together later on, or ever.

If we'll remember the road trips and sleepovers and one-liners and movies and mistakes and summers and papers and answers.

If they'll know our names, our legacies. Because we all leave one.

If we'll know what love is outside a song.

If someday all the minutes we spent in each other's lives will begin to make sense. If we'll see why we were brought together in some peculiar combination of Star Wars and basketball and Midwesterners and locals and snowboards and Kahlua and brothers and Boulder and transfers and camouflage. We're a wily bunch. And we wonder if we'll ever understand how lucky we were together inside the plan.

All those ifs...

We're curious, and it's contagious.

The Van

October 2010

For my siblings

We cleaned the old family van today:
the carpets are now more brown—less gray—
and wrappers of twelve different gum brands
were stuffed in the backseat cupholders.

The waxy printed paper tells of
rides home on Sundays after church breakfasts
when each belt was stretched over the hipbones
of a child—one in each of the benches and buckets.
We went altogether and with filled seats:
in one place, at one time.

We sucked dirt from a dozen states or more—
and as many years—from when we gobbled
the Midwest and jumped to coasts in summers
when we children drove alone, all learning, all leaving.
The sand of seven beaches came up and out
with football pads and baseball bags,
record players and poems scribbled on those wrappers
and napkins that wiped all of our faces
of foreign filth and the sin of thoughtless travesties.

We had left our childhood skins in the upholstery
with engagement rings, teenage things
who we were, and how our family exhaled.