An abstract woman before me,

Sifting through the cacophony,

Her eyes are the very borders

That reduce her existence

Into an image in a mirror.

“To see that I am not a flawed reflection,

That an image of self is a conflicting notion.

For is life not in perpetual motion?

If so, how could I ever conclude?

That I know another, that I know myself?

Why ought there be fear in this?

Not knowing.

Seeing life as a movement,

Everything new in actuality.

Only old in catacomb thought.

Or is there comfort in this image I've held,

Of a woman that clings to her loneliness,

Perceiving herself as being a victim somehow,

Passionate but only loved from a distance,

Honest but often lacking receiving ears,

Finding solace in imagining some pristine love.

Intellectually ridiculous, romantically delicious.

Is this the poverty of this limitation?

A misguided inclination.

For what of love Amanda?

If all you see is a fragmented image.

No assurances to the contrary

Will ever amount.

For only you can see what is,

Is it not you speaking through me?

The pale orb eyes my weary ascent

As I climb the slope that nests my bed.

Accentuating the shadows that awaken

the tentacle grip of the night.

It's borrowed light is familiar to my memory,

Its glow illuminates past images,

Like a familiar friend, highlighting

The impermenance of those moments

and the reality of present solitude.

"But do I cling to these images,

As you do the night?

Must we both find solace

in this hopeless plight?

For we'll both rise tommorow

and fall once more"

Cyclical reality, acceptance amiss,

Climbing the stairs of a homely abyss.

Simmering beneath the surface of this skin,

Is vitality long lost in the realms of thought?

Grieving our lack of insight,

As we author our division,

Drawing lines of separation.

For when is humanity truly whole?

Is it merely in hopeful idealism and

In the marrow of romantic thought?

Weaving through this fragmentary reality

In which we are divided into individuals.

For do we not see mere images of ourselves, of one another?

Is this not the root of our discontent, the fuel of bitter conflict?

A tempestuous mind that assumes,

Distorts and so often rejects

What is?

For the mind is tempestuous,

A torrent of timelines,

Confusion centered on self.

Free of division,

Our hearts are free to meet,

Our ears eager to listen

And we sense deep within

That we are all movements of life,

United in our consciousness.

Surrender my sweet, to the memory of our fallen,

Beneath the feathered shade of a shadowy past,

Hand in hand we witness a harvest, of bittersweet fruit

Borne of sweat and tears over countless years.

Don’t you see my sweet? Our roots are earthly mirrors,

Reflecting eternal wisdom, reminding each branch

Of truths constantly forgotten as they reached for the sky,

Twisting blindly towards the sun, forgetting their place,

Rendering the sacred trunk, a hollowed crypt.

Your eyes are melancholy orbs, dreading the chains of fate,

Fear not my sweet, we may not be free but we may start anew,

By sowing seeds imbued with the lessons of yesterday,

So we may form our own tree, be rid of our sorrowful legacies.

Come here my sweet, rest here with me,

As I paint over the ancients with a palette of hope,

You will be the nourishing light in our new landscape,

Built on the foundation of our perseverance,

And the fruition of a sapling dream,

Our union.

On the streets people herald a new era,

In a carnival of patriotic euphoria,

The fangs of the tiger we bred,

Removed by popular bloodshed.

Strangers in a troubled isle,

Thrust in to decades of exile,

The victims have no voice,

No belonging, no choice.

The poverty of migration,

in a long fractured nation.

How can we speak of unity

When war is but a flame expunged,

And the fuel lies in the hearts of us all,

Protected by ignorance and nurtured by pride.

How can we speak of progress

When we are blind to the roots of prejudice,

When our minds fail to detect,

The guile of opportunistic heroes

and their verbal charades.

And what are we?

If the love we preach is not for all,

If we indulge in victory after war,

If the separation of our kith and kin,

Is an all but necessary sin.

I will never be the daughter of a nation,

I see no purpose in such a fabrication.

My life is and will be an expression

Of my soul's desire to explore

Every possibility to better this world,

Regardless of inching progress

or the finite nature of my existence.

It's strange how fragile memory is: you remember the oldest details and forget the things around you.

I remember myself at 3 - Digging a hole in the ground to collect worms for a baby bird.

I remember almost drowning in a pool at the age of 4, floating near a step.

I remember crying for my mom to punish my brother and then crying again once the deed was done.

I remember standing outside my friends house, waiting on my mom to return from the hospital....she 'accidently' cut herself while shaving. I couldn't make her happy.

I remember walking through the field near our house, trying to hide from him.

I remember finding my mom's stash of rum and replacing it with coke. I wanted her to be sober. She was furious when she realized I had poured it all away...I thought I was doing her a favor.

I remember the trip to Sedona, seeing the snow for the first time with fresh eyes...The cop that let us go in pity. The awkward silence on the way back.

I remember the first girl I ever had a crush on. I'd sneak a gaze when she studiously wrote notes during biology class.Nothing ever came of it, thank the heavens...i was never in one place long enough and I was a dork anyway.

I remember how sad I was when Tiger passed away, my brothers cat that I was very fond of, my mom ran over him while I was in the car with her. I still haven't forgiven her.

I remember the time the boyscouts helped us move as my mom sat in the corner, drunk and yelling out orders to the volunteers. I felt compleately and utterly ashamed.

I remember going to Jessica's for the first time. The way her house felt like home, even then.

I remember when James gave me a necklace on valentines day. I felt, at that moment, that he was my father and the need to find my real one drifted away.

I remember feeling so strongly for someone that I lost myself and soon I lost them.

I briefly recall the pain that i've felt for years, though each one seems to wipe its wounds before welcoming a new season. Constantly moving, constantly changing...places..faces...situations. Yet I often wake from my sleep and wonder where on earth I am....who I am..and how I came to be. If this heart and head can take more of this seemingly epic progression...or if i'm a candle that's losing it's flame.

In a state of stasis ..you wonder if new ones will be formed..if they will be good...where the actors and actresses will come from...

The sun beat heavy down on us,

Sweating our sap from our pores,

Soles pressing the earth for a home,

For our weary ears are still drowned in

The sound of thunder

In the arms of men.

Our child is dying and we can barely sleep,

His loving mother, my grieving wife,

His aching body on my guilty back,

I have brought him into suffering,

The fields are not for him to play.

Women weep in march and men breed anger,

Amidst the palms and blue ocean shore,

The sound of thunder in the arms of men

Oh Atlas,

We're brothers in burden,

This migration empties me,

We walk these ruinous paths to peace,

Knowing we'll never reach.

And it amazes me how quickly my mood can change from something so small and non-threatening. I loathe this feeling of vulnerability. I’ve been a master at controlling my emotions for about 4 years now and all of a sudden, I’ve lost my touch. How can I loose the only ability that kept me going….kept me semi-sane. I’m trying to be cool and casual but this isn’t casual to me. It’s something more and it’s something that I did not expect nor want. I woke up today in a fit of giggles and now I’m dreary beyond belief…thinking of all the hate in the world instead of the beauty. I need to reflect….I need to progress…and I need to do it soon. 

I finished reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle a week ago and figured I would write a small story on the love between man and dog. Here it is:

The click of the pendulum was a thread of sound in a fabric of silence. A mixture of waning daylight and the warm glow of a solitary bulb stretched across the white walls of the room. He was seated at the head of the dining table, surveying his surrounds with a curious gleam in his eyes. His dog lay at his feet, twitching as he ventured through a mysterious realm of sleep. He watched his mother's beige curtains flow upward as a delicate wind wafted in through the open windows, suspended in air for a precious moment before easing into place. His gaze shifted between objects in the room; the antique furniture, the African masks, the crystal ornaments, the paintings and old photographs. Each with an origin and history far beyond the space they now occupied. Yet they were at home in this house in Brazil, fragments in a network of memory.

A smile dominated his expression as he rested his head on his left palm. He muffled a cough with tight lips and a clenched right hand as he rose from the chair, careful not to wake his sleeping companion. He walked towards the grills on the windows and looked out onto the garden, the bright green of the palms were fading with the retreating sun. Traces of orange longing clung to the clouds in defiance of fading prominence. Witness to transition, the words and pictures in his mind awoke and fixed upon his chords.

"The yolk of past circumstance wore me thin. The marrow of my consciousness has been but a stream of melancholy, secretly welcoming adversity. It is only now that I differentiate between a chronicle and the person beneath. It is only now that I feel with a sense of certainty, the treachery of time in my mind and the length of my preoccupation. This near silence is pristine in its spaciousness.  I am adrift and feel no containment in this supposed solitude."

He heads back towards the table and kneels next to the chair he had been sitting in. A quiet surge of affection drifts through his eyes as he watches his dog, still deep in sleep. He bore little trace of aging as his chest moved in rhythm to his breathing, his paws stretched across the tiles.

"I may never see you again boy. Yet I feel no great sadness in this as I did before. It's no exaggeration...I've had more time with you than with my own father. In truth, next to no one has been a part of my life as you have. And it may be... that no other being will be as consistently happy to see me and show me affection with such simple immediacy. But we've had so many years...we've grown together. I could so easily slide to the sorrow of reflection...but I'd much rather revel in how peaceful you are right now. In this series of moments, a link of liberating truths have dawned on me. I can only describe it as being the death of a shadow and a lightness of being. We as humans fall prey to the very complexity that fuels our vanity. You have little need for words and intellect to just be...free of wasteful cognition and resistance. What uses have we for life stories. Our minds can be the very smoke that shrouds our spirit from all things of consequence."

Lying on the floor, moments trickle with the grace of long awaited raindrops as his eyes begin to seal. He thought of the strange but beautiful punctuation that had ended a most turbulent sentence. Hours later, he was greeted by the familiar touch of a wet nose. The clock chimed with self importance but found no ears.
 

The pillars of our hearts hold,

A canvas of compassion untold.

Eclipsing all cerebral noise,

Its strokes are tacit poise.

Our dividing delusions,

Our numbing accumulations,

Are meaningless upon its viewing,

The fabric knows not our shame.

“I have no compass.

But I seek your direction"

'Canvas of my affection,

If only another could recognize,

You are the gleam in my eyes'

I woke to a cerulean sky this morning. It looks so warm and liberating, even if viewed from a high window. I love the sky. I always have and I’ve been fortunate enough to see it from many places. I guess the fundamental irony that arises within oneself when looking upon the sky, is that we are far from free. We are slaves to others, to ourselves and the sky is a symbol of our longing.

But what would we do if we were free? I often wonder. Me, I am a slave to my mind, to my heart, to the past. They are connected in places I can't decipher. So I’m awaiting change, awaiting freedom, feeling that not everything is in my realm of control. That this cake is missing, is lacking chocolate.

But is this really the case?  Is it love I'm after? Or would that just muddle my worldly aspirations, given that few understand my soul. Then again, I've always been a dreamer and things I dream of are rarely based in reality. This I’ve come to learn the very hard way, experience.  All I can say for sure is this....

A purposeful gaze into your sunlit serenity,

Leaves me certain of these spaces I house,

Free of will, chained to ambiguity.

Lacking resolve, rooted in yearning.

How could I be lonely when I'm with you?

All of you.

Oh sunshine are you throwing me a lifeline?

All I need is you.

It was a night of fury - as burdened clouds poured without relent and the wind howled through the helpless trees. A mournful cry that set the moon to retreat, fearing witness.I was but a blur, gliding across the shimmering street with a mirror storm in mind. My feet eventually slowed to a walk as streams trickled across my forehead and down the length of my weary arms.

I thought of the places I've lived and the times I've felt the cold. A cold distance, a separation, the agony of closed doors and the corruption of ones intentions. For all this,  no winter can do unto skin. Often, the sacred pools of our hearts, once tainted by a single foul sip, breeds  suspicion that governs all its visitors there onward. There are borders to our love that need be patrolled. Yet what of those who soldier through the aches and welcome with open arms, only to find a deep solitude in their sincerity? I was filled to the brim with doubt - for I found want in me that I ought live without.

Leaves danced across the pavement as the wind continued its tantrum and oh how I felt its lament. Its tortured cries for attention, its vigorous desire to shake the very foundations of the world that allowed it to be. In these moments, the deficiencies of my mind became clear to me, crystalised in that sound. My mind's retreat into want,  for comfort and affection, in fear of the days and years to come.  For though I am fortunate to know of my purpose, I perceived the journey as being solitary. For like the wind that night , there is a passion in me constantly overlooked, unseen, only felt in a storming rage. So I thought and as the streams turned to rivers across my body, the core of my mistake was revealed to me - I thought.

There is fear in doubt - one thinks. The fear of sorrow, of solitude, of ache, of disgrace or deception. There is anxiety- one feels. For want of love, of success, of comfort and familiarity.  Thus our minds stretch into a future state of illusory construction and seek certainty in what is yet to be. The madness of which is only apparent in pure lucidity, when there is no barrier within. For to look upon my own life with reason - there has been no predictor of my journey, no map of circumstance.

In weakness I thought of the last time I held another in my arms and another held me. It was so long ago and the rain makes one sentimental. I have since felt the futility of the past's cling and the archival memories that collect and corrupt our senses. One, however, cannot ever lie to oneself. I felt a new realm of solitude that comes with homelessness. a despairing doubt that questions one's ability to wander the streets of life alone.Though the mood that night was ominous gray, I felt a strange surge took hold of me as I billowed up the incline towards my street.

But tonight I can imagine a different sentiment. The sweet smell of a future friend, whether it be in vain for trying or rewarding to have tried. Cause she leaves traces of her breathe on my neck as I shudder. I can still remember the light touch of her kiss from last night. The whispers and comfort that all life forms from her. I may have gotten over my head but that is just a small downfall with so much to continue in its place.

The water flowed, disregarding fabric and skin, dripping on to the flooding road from the tips of my fingers.  I was not cold, I was alive, with reason coursing through my consciousness. I thought not of my foolishness, of the divisions in my mind,  of solitude, or the fractures in my heart that bred sorrow. There was silence within and all I felt was the water across my skin and the wind through my ears. And I ask of you now as I asked of myself right then - Is there not beauty in doubt? For to be aware of its futility, is to open the door to all that is, all that we are - divided only by our delusions.