Singing from the Cellar Door

Tonight,

singing up from the cellar door,

there is nothing more,

than too many explanations…..

By the way, that Bright Eyes post makes me wonder if you’re really over the idea of coming home to be a cowboy… and it makes me think about last weekend, laying wasted by the fire at Chris’s place and listening to some guy play bright eyes songs on my old acoustic… and of how freakishly in love I sometimes feel but am afraid to feel all the way because the man I’m imagining is in every way a hot mess…. and how so am I….
and it makes me think about how I’m gonna do it anyway. Jump. Maybe marry a musician. Make babies. Navigate insane dynamics. Work for what i believe in. Be who I am. Write like I mean it (even if for only a minute).

And not just someday…….

But someday soon.

“This is the first day of my life
I swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach”

3:23 on a Tuesday afternoon…
….It is not. But I read it in a blog, and I got it in my mind –

….

10:38 on a Saturday night and the sickness seems insatiable, craving disaster the way I once craved a good book (the bastard). What is wrong, I can’t quite say – once upon a time I’d cleverly reply “smart went crazy” and leave it at that… but the depths of my depravity now requires an explanation that ill-adapted plagiarism can simply not supply.

….

In the memo, my voice sounds strange, almost other-worldly …. Sad. Distant; Like a woman calling weakly up a narrow well for help. This isn’t such a stretch I guess, given the grip that my monsters have strengthened…. And yet….

….

I’ve missed those two syllables in my time away from writing. (And yet, And yet).

And I’ve missed mantras, the blankness of waiting, the practice of process…. The satisfaction of the purge. Knowing always that it is time (and none like the present) hasn’t done a damn bit of good for me it seems, because here I am, saying the same things that I have always said, feeling the way the world defeats my capture, my ineptitudes and flailings flagrant — but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel good to do so.

….

When all else fails, words for the sake of themselves will swoop in and save me. Devoid of any intelligible meaning though they may be – swoop they do, and saved I am; graced with the gift of another chance to make it different, make it more….

….

“It’s hard to keep your heart hard, when you’re confronted with startling beauty of someone’s fucked up and fragile humanity.”

….

I can hear in the memo the wind from open window – driving west and feeling weightless, blessed at the chance to meet myself in an honest moment, I hit record and I utter these words. It’s just a moment of course. A solitary instant of easy breath in the constrictive web and chain of event,….

….

And yet.

….

As desperate as I become, as deep as I might travel – it is split seconds such as these in which I sense the tether that my existence finds the flame and ache it needs to strive for its continuance.

….

Watching you as you sit now across from me, your fingers working furiously over your own symbolic umbilical chord, I breathe deep and think about what any of this might mean, if anything…

….

And if anything,

….

My heart

….

Feels anything but hard.

My last night in Paris, and I lean out the open window to take in the sleeping street. Before too long, Limonoello and beer will turn to coffee and water – the droning buzz to a hum… and then the light, the morning, the flight, the goodbye, the return…

….

….

Six hours, and no need to hurry, I begin to wonder if the middle of the night is a good time to begin… to begin the unwrapping and unfolding even as the rolling and packing proceeds on the physical plain. Reflection is imminent, if not convenient == ahh, but what am I if not symbolic in my constant exiting?

….

On the street, people still stroll… but few and well spaced enough to notice my light, the figure in the window that watches unabashed, now with nothing to lose, as if ever there was….

….

and I jump ahead in time to make this moment memory.

….

Paris was a whiff of piss, the sound of a sister’s voice, an over-priced drink…

Paris was a dream, a time to re-read “Eleven Minutes…” a street show, a drunken dance, old and lovely, new and chic… Paris was an absence, an abscess, an unknown growth…. And it grows…. It grows…..

….

Paris, Paris, Paris, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia….

….

….

Five hours and 45 minutes and the playlist stumbles to M. Ward and five hours and 45 minutes sounds too long to wait for a taxi. I want to be home, and writing of Paris, I realize, would be a total joke, because it’s home and home alone that concerns me most in this moment,… and every other. I jump ahead in time and…

….

Home. Clicking my dirty, tar-stained heels I think of the open courtyard to take the place of open window… the open palms and eyes of my lover….

Let me close the door on this moment, so I can open unto the next.

….

Don’t get me wrong; I lust to wander with the best of them, but for me the beauty in the leaving will always weigh its heaviest in the return. In every new teaching and intriguing far-flung moment is the reminder of my roots –and these moments only food for the sturdy strength nothing can take the place of. HOME.

….

Here I come….

On its seventh day of death my ipod revives on the original version of Blackbird. I’m in the mood for hip-hop when it happens, but the rules of the game state that the Woo-woo Mama card must always trump the Diva — so I listen. Once, twice… three times a lady and a charm…. ….

And after a hard week of darkness, the symbology of sunken eyes does not escape me, even arrested as I am in the moment by the shallow vision of terror.  ….

 ….

I keep finding on my path the crossing of winged reminders such as these. Last week it was the Queen of Spades… transparent and, as the rules of the game states, worth 13 hearts. I found it on the floor of an apartment I was cleaning while muttering to myself an accidental prayer (which incidentally from my lips sounds an awful lot like cursing). Just that morning I had woken up to a dream that I understood would not be leaving me anytime soon– black leaves and slick, black, sticky webs, = explosive, putrid fears trying to escape through my impossibly tiny but otherwise seemingly healthy looking pores. Desperate to purge the image of that poison, I decided to paint it – But try as I might, I couldn’t capture it to save my life. The black would not get black enough….the webs kept coming out as harmless cartoon flowers (the accidental optimism in this failure of artistic expression not lost on me either)……….

 ….

—-Somewhere between faith and the suspicion of denial, I find a truth that suits me – and as always, it comes to me in symbols dressed cleverly in easy-to-miss skins of coincidence—-….

 ….

 ….

 Fueled by the strength of good sleep and lots o water, I woke up today for once on the right side of the world’s hard on. With curls and curves a’drip and slick with sweat, I wove down the street all sex and salt and mystery: confused at the feeling of unprecedented attention – flushed and pushed forward by a craving for the coolness and well-worn musk of a book I knew somehow, somewhere, should have my name on it. It found me fast and easy – or THEY did I should say. The first I picked up only to have it fall open at once to a name I know well and a startlingly familiar line. The second called out from a more alien landscape, but seemed no less right when its heft hit my palm. ….

 ….

Walking home five pounds heavier and a burdens-worth lighter, I felt once again what I felt at the unexpected opening notes of a blackbird turned phoenix: Well. Right. Alive. FOUND…..

 ….

 ….Reminded of how much I belong,….

 and how very much I want to be here. ….

 ….

 ….

 ….

 ….

Half insane with ache and craving chiropractic cure like crazy, I sumberge myself in a tub full of epson salts and beg the water to get warmer. The crackling that comes from the tennis-ball sized lumps along the blades of my shoulders, I know, is a signal that the time has finally come for some care to be taken….but honestly, my thoughts tend to lend themselves more to the imaginings of cutting off my own head. Reconvening with my current conundrum on the couch, I commence the deconstruction — *drugsmokedrink, drugsmokedrink drugsmokedrink drugsmokedrink* With the chugging inflection of a busted starter, I make my way through the evening like this… trying hard to resurrect my killed concentration by challenging it ruthlessly, as if I could anger it into an awakened state by way of behaving most utterly absurd…

Driving once again headfirst into failure, I remind myself with a bluntness that could just as easily cause trauma that none of what I’ve just done is fueling. Structure, strategy,… spiritual strength…. I do my best with addled brains to take stock of what still functions of these features: scraping the pennies of my potential together in the hopes that I might come up with a fair offering for some repairs…

He asks cross the cubicle void if I’d given any thought to embracing myself just the way that I am. Curls bounce incredulity….

At home alone I pick up a book of poetry. Feeling full and inspired, I tell my thighs I’d like to buy them a typewriter. “I’ll write you love letters” I promise them, hoping the thickness of their figures will forgive me.

An old typewriter.

With round keys and silver inlays.

It started as an accidental slur if I recall, but he picked it up like a shiney penny from the sidewalk, brushed it off, and made it charming. It was one of those affectionate moments that no one expects: the impact of an off the cuff joke and play on words knocking me sideways with its tenderness. When it hurts (as we all know, it often does) — I think of this.

I shove you lay. I shove. You lay. I shove you. Lay. (I love you Shea).

Commands and observations and possiblities just endless, and this, a playful jab become gem in the heart during the hard parts =

When I become dizzy and tingly and consumed with the fear of death. When my kitty goes missing and I discover that once again I’ve managed to burn boiling pasta. When I take another drink when all I want is to stretch.

…When I get done with the shoving, and all I want is to lay.

And all of a sudden, as much struggle as the day has sent me, I feel calm. Loved. Lucky beyond belief. Grateful for the push and pull. At ease with my anxiety, matter of fact about the fierce terror that turns to face me….

And every single instant of this life reveals itself to be the worth living.

I fall too deeply into corpse pose and crawl out with a crackling panic. There’s a crater of starvation in my gut where before there was nothing, and I think, maybe I’ve moved too suddenly….
Shavasna doesn’t usually draw me in, not like this. Stretching the leaden limbs of living rigamortis feels anything but relieving — but the kicker is this cut tether, the feel of my being completely ceasing its cling: the burden of its absent bliss. It’s a moment of total vulnerability, — and I am stone cold sober. No one has died, and my heart hasn’t broken. No external force has pushed my brain or body to the brink…

Sudden revival has a bloody tinge of iron to the taste. It isn’t altogether unpleasant in itself — it’s the electric pulse of worry that emerges with the light that lights on terror when I become aware for the first time of….

In those first moments I want to say: susceptibility. Sitting on my porch now, safe and reawakened to my pains, the right word comes to me: capacity. Capacity to hand over control from the inside out — to let go without the press of weight — submit from a source of power, a place of strength instead of weakness. What frightens in those first moments is the unfamiliar feel of a witch’s newest spell… the cognitive dissonance of a kid who’s sent her whole life trying to rein it all in, clench her fists, and act tough.

And the backlash is brutal. I pound the keys and snap my muscles, cursing reflexively. I’m angry and can’t say in certain and tangible enough terms just why, though some cool untouched stone in my molten core already knows…

I could attempt to reach through the heat to feel it, but relief I know is not on the agenda for this evening. It’s enough to sense the seed for now.

And so another moment of growth announces its imminence