in my metaphor, he wants to learn quantum mechanics instead of architecture

I.
Mythologies
Archetypes
Roles
Jobs


II.
Does the mind have states
the way matter has states?

Can I pour myself into stillness,
into the container of my body

My mom called me a ray of refracted light
but I didn't respond, she has me all wrong

I want to be the Prism
that light passes through



III.
We automatically assume aliens arrive
with their own foreign wisdom

Why don't we assume the same
about children?


IV.
For every hollowness
there is a voluminous - ness

In every curve there is the experience
of concavity and convexity

Straightness has nothing to do
with goodness


V.
damage can trigger
a cell to choose
a different career

express a different
part of its identity
potential


VI.
Maybe the Eyes see for the Hand
Maybe the Hand expresses the desires
of the Ribcage, to taste, to be connected
Maybe the Mouth forms words
to sing the Siren's song of the Heart

Somewhere there is a confusion
between the desire for connection
and owning it - a colonizing
of the web that cuts off the ability
to notice the forces moving through it,

through us.

the light brightens almost imperceptibly

XX.
Journeys
states of being
precipice
charging forward
cacophony of people
history, words, voices
boundaries, limitations
walls
doorways, windows


XXI.
Stories swirling around me
mom constantly rewrites hers to keep herself safe
I was programmed to be an object
I'm falling apart
A hand on my ribs telling me to soften
Where is the maze? Am I in it?
To rewrite my script, I have to seek out
the source, the code, the core
I have to walk right in to what I've been containing,
avoiding.


XXII.
There is almost nothing more delicious in my mind
than a warm night wrapping itself around you

When I lived in Richmond, I loved the heat with all of my body
wandering past lush gardens in the dark, on the phone,
or alone
I spent a whole year there, in the Fan district
near Museum Row
walking past the statue of Robert E. Lee
on my way down Monument Avenue to the laundromat

The most amazing coffee I've ever tasted
roasted in a nearly invisible space
across the street from the 7-Eleven

my roommate
was the mother of the person I was dating
She apologized frequently for how her daughter treated me
and I kept her company while this person we both were trying to love
traveled for work, too busy to care about either of us.

There was almost never a need to turn on the lights,
the sunshine poured itself through the ancient scum on the windows
wrapped itself around the moldings,
the towers of stuff owned by this woman
dusty, useless

As time rolled on, I caught the mice and released them back
into a neighbor's garden
and convinced the roaches to be a little less brazen
I unearthed her kitchen sink
and then, eventually
her stove

We began a game of filling up trash bags to take to goodwill
Slowly, we could see the walls again
so we bought paint to put on them

In the slow release, the floor became available for sweeping
and the decades seemed to have piled up in the corners of every room
In my confusion, I sorted through the quarter sized flakes everywhere
trying to figure out where they might be coming from

I realized they were the evidence of the psoriasis that consumed her whole body
Years and puddles of dead skin
shed but not gone

I can't help but suspect, in my secret heart
that they are a clue about feelings,
shame
about her children, her life
a previous husband
the damage he caused
even though he looked the part

eating her up from the inside.

Tabula Rasa

While binge-watching a tv show about the history of a particular Viking hero, and researching the exploits and overlaps referenced in this semi-historical narrative, there came one of those moments - a life changing realization through the eyes of a mostly fictitious character arc. A child is introduced to him, with the clear blue eyes of a person that meant a great deal to him and was killed in a jealous rage by one of his other companions. In the blank, innocent look of this child-of-his-lost-companion, this great Viking warrior paused and gently touched his fingertips to the boy's face. I felt, with the sharpness of a cut, the history of those two figures, made manifest in the presence of his descendant... and I understood for probably the first time the intensity of looking into the face of one's child or grandchild, or that of a close friend. How in the eyes of those-that-came-before-us, we are also a culmination of so many preexisting circumstances, a physical manifestation of a million little moments and rainy days and hard choices and secret shared smiles and successes and failures and how-are-we-going-to-survive-this; we are all creatures born in the crest of a wave, in the dynamic tensions of a butterfly that flapped its wings on the other side of the world, like the stars and Aphrodite, merely an expression of the teeming currents moving invisibly in the darkness underneath and before what we can actually see.

John Locke had it all wrong, maybe what the bible was trying to say was actually a poorly worded version of something more true. Less 'The sins of the fathers being visited upon the children', more how so many of our actions and gestures we perform every day, and the threads we may confuse as our own may be habits and patterns that are discernable across many generations, part of the primordial stuff that we come into being inside of, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

Just as we often envision ourselves as truly individual beings, I think it is hard to have a really clear sense of our parents and their parents in a context before we transformed them into something else, an identity that they can never discard. What dies to make room for this magical induction, this double baptism, for this new name they will take with them to the grave? And what of those parts of myself that are so like my primary caregivers that I am so angry at and ashamed of? I am not so interested in the person my mother is currently trying to convince everyone that she is, since it is an elaborate defense against choices made when we were both young, and no one is around to hold her accountable. I do however wish I could dig into some of her earlier feelings and experiences, separate from her intensely obsessive and controlling reaction to me as her offspring/pawn/property, and her insistence that I'm just acting like an angry, adolescent brat, rather than a human being who deserves to be listened to, considered, who may be emotionally intelligent or possessing a valid argument about how her choices have realtime and lasting impacts on the children who were left in her care and won't go away until she is willing to be in the pain of addressing them with us. How do I learn about this person and the ways we are similar, without triggering her many layered defenses? Her father used to call her 'the Hulk', her rage was so uncontrollable when she was younger. I suspect my Grandmother fiscally supports my mother because she feels so deeply guilty for what she stood by and allowed to happen in the household my mother grew up in, and I've heard from my sister that Grama told her just how much like her father my mother is. While I may have found a container for rage that has been incredibly fortuitous for me professionally, I know, sometimes more than others, how that taking over/taking control/unable to turn it off mechanism is a direct channeling of the woman who raised me.

'Hollow' is the word my little brother used, describing to me what trying to talk to her is like. It is deeply unsettling to me, this person who calls herself a mother, but has never once asked any of her children how they feel about anything, or why. That someone in her place could be so uncurious about our hopes and fears and choices. But maybe that is what was modeled to her, maybe there is an unheard, neglected child buried deep within her being that is so hungry it makes her blind to us. Is it possible to go unarmed after all this time and anger in search for my mother's soul, locked so deep in the fortress of her stories, and not get lost?

I don't know that I'm quite brave or strong enough to fumble around in her darkness to untangle our shared threads, but I can feel the places in my body where I've ignored pain have created weaknesses in other compensatory places, and I've begun to chase those uncomfortable places to look for what lives on the other side. As strong as I may become though, only she can choose to wade through her scar tissue and liberate those pathways between herself and the rest of the world.

Between herself and her children, who have been waiting our whole lives for her to make that choice.

   

Whatever gets you through the rituals

XV.
City of barnacles
passing a half burnt house
falling apart, fleas
inside the crumbling building
doors lead to musty rooms
with collapsed ceilings
crumbling paint on old opera sets
containing the history of my craft
mastery in every whorl and cloud 
and shadowed transition
coming apart in my hands
flakes of vibrant colors
becoming grey dust
like Dorothy returning
to her washed out, thirsty home
after the technicolor of Oz.


XVI.
tasting things activates the process
of taking things in
maybe hearing is just the beginning
of listening


XVII.
My little brother
taller than all of us now
affectionately mentioned
during a holiday
the house full
of our family's particular
dominating cackle
a joyful witch's laughter
that we are all known by
but becomes a devastating
force when we all
come together.


XVIII.
Shame keeps them shuttered inside of themselves, unknowable
like a clam bed in muddy low lying water
they propagate a denial that removes them from their own history
ready to slice open the feet of any of us that try to escape
from the bog of my clan


XIX.
'Disarming' he called me
when I asked for an evaluation
what a strange word

'half cocked' my mother
always said I was
like a gun
An old boss friend referred to me
as a 'tank' on numerous occasions
expressed disbelief
when I mentioned crying
and even before that
a 'caged tiger'
from the lips of an earlier employer
as she mimicked the pent up rage
that moved my body as we spoke

Disarming.

I can't stop thinking about that word.

You be the rock and I will be the river

IX.
passive time travel
multiple features of space
the salt, sugar and fat
of things that obsess us
coming to terms with our past.



X.
Sands of Time
an hourglass
Mortality
in the shape
of a Woman.



XI.
Women in teal with cheetah print
aprons, wire frame
glasses and chunky necklaces
from Guatemala silk scarves
from Cambodia
scrubbing bright colors
onto their canvases



XII.
autumn trees frame
parts of the ancient brick
turret outside the window
rust streaking the walls
matching the rust color of the
trees, just as the grey
of the brick matches
the perpetually grey sky.



XIII.
Succinct, dry, older Russian professor looked at me through my tears
after I put a robe over my naked body
while the students took a break from drawing me.

'Look,' he told me, 'I'm not into giving advice, but you are too young to worry so much about someone else's problems.'

He talked vaguely about his mother needing some kind of surgery, complicated
he can't paint, because it is such a thinking process, such a mental focus
and he is too obsessive compulsive to stop thinking
about his mother.

So he does mindless things.
He ironed every shirt in his house.



XIV.
I wanted to be nothing
but muscle and sinew
an archetype
wolf as chaos
rather than
woman as grail
a vessel
to be held, filled
tree that bears fruit,
holds up the sky
home base, earth
man is that sky?
the spear flying through the air?
the act of filling,
expansion?
the bow of the body needs
its own arrow
of time, intention
what am I if my curves melt away
into nothing
but muscle and sinew?