Dear Journey:

CONFESSION (of the sexual kind)

I pull them in unintentionally and they become arrested, prisoners pulled from the sheets and into the wind, and they look towards me for answers, security, protection: I am not your goddess. I wasn’t meant to be seen in soft lights, the glow I manifest as I step is not meant to bring you closer, the haze that emanates is not intended to attract your kind; I am only trying to get by; this elusiveness is merely the natural byproduct of the processes of my survival. I guess its not worth it to smile, when the lonely grasp onto it like a rope dropped to save the masses from a well; the weak see it as an invitation to fall in love. But a smile is a way for me to say that life is alright; like a stone in the center of a rapid stream I let the rough waters stroke my back and continue to stare in the same direction, never waiting or wanting more from the swarms of wave riders that grace my space with a swift hello.

But some want to stay despite that the flow is too strong: you try to hang on forever and I’ll forever ask for your removal; you see, you are a stone too, to think you are free falling and failing to love is to mistake your life with the life of floating debris.

I am no trickster: If anything I am too kind to reveal the truth that I do not love you in the way that lovers do: but it hurts me to see you unhappy, (this is my dishonesty) and so I allow you to hold on until your arms became tired and sore; eventually impermanence is revealed (nothing is ever-lasting, I should know better) and you require another way and so you were forced to figure the truth of my indifference, and you did but it was a painful realization, and so with your wild imagination you tell a story in which I embody the source of all your troubles and regress: it makes it easier to let go this way, it does when you confess your hatred of the thing to which you are so attached (after they buck you), like burning your finger on fire and claiming to never want to witness vivid flames burn again. The fire is the reason for the tingle and the taste (of searing flesh), and I am the reason your heart breaks, and I hate to see you unhappy, so I let it be, I accept your ill-energies with a smile and a shrug.

Nothing personal, I tell myself. How could I truly hear your hostilities and be alright? I don’t sit on a thrown, I don’t wear any robes; I am not more than human. Yet you throw demon-blessed frequencies my way as if I have developed some royal filter that purifies my heart each time some mean confession permeates the air I breathe. I have no such abilities. I have only the power to remove the power from your words by understanding that you are damaged and destroyed by your need to believe these illusions of me created by your gushing mind. In protecting yourself; in preserving your righteousness, sense of security, and in anticipating disappointment, your thoughts have painted me in dismal tones of black and blue and now your masterpiece hangs in the hall with other untouchable works of a loathsome hue; I am not defined as such but by your side. After all I was never meant for such things as being the center of a crying artist’s attention; besides, I know this, and suddenly I burst out of the shell and leave bitter rinds to rot; sweet citrus oozes as tangy teardrops from my eyes and I find that I need not erase you from my life, but to stay and witness how clever the trickster actually is, watching him coax you into believing the illusions of your trying mind, decorating the cake you bake in celebration of your freedom from me with an icy coat of useless rumors.

So it goes, and such is life. If this is the process then I surrender: I ask for nothing and I apologize to no one when that means I must scold the most sacred part of myself: my love.

That’s the thing about love: where you think its your partner that has betrayed you and whom you can no longer trust it is in fact yourself that has granted them the authority to make you the lesser. Love has a funny way of glorifying the beloved; you then compare them to things like crystal radiance and full moons, and they become just as powerful in your mind. Of course,once they leave its like god kicked the stars from your skies and dulled your vision of shiny lights: the only way you can regain stability and ground, the only way things can ever be the same is if you commit to maim and slander; so you tear violently at those projections of your beloved that you yourself created, pulling yourself back up and into reality by clawing into the goddess flesh of your once lover and telling yourself its the right thing to do because she couldn’t be worth anything more since she hurt you so badly. You justify your actions by blaming the ex-lover, when in all truth this love couldn’t exist without you, the carrier of love’s disease, and the act of all this fluff and dramatic break-up stuff is just a natural reaction to feeling as though you’ve been rejected by a queen: I am no queen, therefore, you’re argument is invalid. See? love is the trickster, not I (said the little red hen).

Where is the lesson in this?

Honesty.

I acted wrongly and perpetuated bastard energies. Time has asked me to stop yet now the mess is mercury hot, it begs to be removed from the nearness of the sun.

Run away tiny coyote! How many more forest friends will you consume before you belch the bones of your rancid ways?

Rain dance tonight! Ancient practice revives to cleanse the pollution of clumsy creations!

You say I’m so stubborn and cruel. Well then, I am so pleased to be yours and to have mine, let’s make more things to carry this crooked ship down the depths of uselessness.

But alas! A pirate with a pen, ravaging with words, a sentence he sharpens from the blade forged by many prophesying men: ‘death to things that make us feel weak, small and tired: that keep us on our feet! When what we require is a deep enough sleep, to drum a clear beat so the people can step dangerously in time with the ticking of the tides riding high on the moon’s backside and be free!’

Okay, I’m here. I am here! What spirit has called my attention at this place and at this hour and what must I do to appease your formless brew?

Listen you say, but instead I translate it as a condition of my diminishing physique; I nourish my bones with sweet and saucy, I lick my fingers when I should be licking the soles of Buddha’s feet; “don’t bother me! Pull the reigns of your fiery chariot and pierce your own heart; the arrow draws a string with which to pull the muscle from its nest, leave mine alone!.”

“Shut up and be still, this is why you were called, not for a culinary thrill, silly human.”

‘Okay!’ what now?!?!’ distractions arise from illusive shadows and thoughts generate to flush the intelligence of five senses: I ponder something besides my knowing of this realm. But the channel has been allowed by bundles of sage and narrow icicles of wax that beg for a chance to chase darkness away in a blaze.

Dear Journey,

Don’t write with confusion; write with clarity! Even poetry demands clarity, not in words and how they are presented, but poetry requires clarity of origin: this means not right nor wrong, but that the author is clear in representing confusion, sadness; what does this mean exactly? It means to be fully aware of yourself in the moment you grant for reflection and honesty (don’t worry, no one is watching) and be true to the experience as it is, raw and organic from your center, whatever it may be in the present moment. Be certain of the source and let the words form around them and align naturally in a march of syntax and prose; this is personal poetry, this is your gift, this is what you offer the world and it is beautiful because you made the space for it and it is authentically you.

Once the words are before you, these precious gems of absolute insight and depth, after you read them, separate from them: do not own them. You mustn’t feel responsible for their impact; disassociate from the words and they will inspire you in whatever way they do; your past self intended them as a guide, maybe for you, perhaps for another. The words are not yours; they belong to a greater source when they are born from clarity and consciousness. This way you can witness their power to unite and to change, phenomena which happens when and only when they are released.

You see, words are only sounds, particles, elements: they begin as a thought that forms from ingredients that interact in our minds, we send outward this energy in waves upon which we place words linearly, one word after the other, like our understanding of time, in a sequence like we see our own lives; but round is the actual order of things, infinity is the essence of higher planes of existence; our part is finite so we experience the beginning and the end of form and function, as we ourselves have a birth and death; but circularity is truth though ambiguous within the shallow measure of our immediate awareness.

To travel distances, to be said or written and heard and read, words must hitch a ride upon waves of energy that are continuous and infinite, floating and colliding and stemming from and branching off and bumping into other waves, like cellular waves, microwaves, brain waves, ocean waves, wind waves, emotional waves, static waves: with intention we send outwards our words like a message in a bottle atop a wave of energy that we have harnessed for the moment, attracted to us by the energies we have magnetically pulled and borrowed from this dimension (in conjunction with other dimensions?). The slower the wave the more direct from source, the more rapid the frequency the more momentum and force; these are the ones that require that the borrower use caution; they can cut and slice, they can tear and infiltrate and pass and influence, hurt and harm and devastate and destroy, much like ugly words with claws in waves whispered from the mouth of a conniving magician.

These high pitched waves are coming in at frequencies beyond which we can measure with our primary sense; we can neither see them nor predict them, therefore we can only cancel them by committing to impeccability; whole truths upon which we place words of a positive nature, honest and of the deepest blue; if you don’t make magic then magic is made upon you: saying love once invalidates the perpetuation of historic hatred and restores crystals to beauty and balance. Love yourself, love your energies, love the words as they are sent outwards and beyond the scope of control, let them surf the waves and purify the atmosphere of nonsense, chaos and confusion.

Be honest, source words from source, bow before your own energies, respect divine human potential; this is service of the highest self. Tentacles-waves are like wind; it carries dust that falls onto the lashes dropping center in a tear cried from the eyes of a weeping camel: it will find the earth and one day be carried again to grace the sky with its presence: every thing which is IS something which will connect to something else: nothing is ever truly free from belonging in the sense that it will inevitably serve as an influence or impression in this stage of reality. Even dust has a history, as do we, and so as wind drives sand so must we drive our words in a caravan towards LOVE.

In examining my existence I find that

there is only one, only one way home.

Today I mourn the vacancies in a sequence of three; one step, one stab, one me. I look for help but I am received with utter distaste; I am in the way and I do not belong here.

A smile cannot be found though people pour into streets like water from a wild fountain, they race to be places but the reason why is cleverly disguised; I just want to go home, back to nature’s womb, cuddled in the arms of vastness, blanketed in warmth and reading poems carved like symbols of imperfect hearts into the crust of a scorched tree.

‘The city, the city the city!’ I cry to the people so distant performing so distantly: why must I stay? Let them race and rot along the way, my city-self is suicidal and she demands her way; stillness is met by tears that grace pavement which meets my spirit that is so exhausted from exhausting every attempt to adapt by being higher this and not-so-much that; then what?

Then what when I walk around and I give myself and I bear my soul in honesty, and I allow and I disallow; I am drying up! It seems that every step I take requires another moment of stillness so I can collect and continue; and for what; for what? For what?

I require a way home. To the woods can I come now? Can I come home now? Can I come home now please? I think maybe you forgot me here, did I miss my turn to return? Can I come home now?

I know you say that the chains are illusory but I see today my life in this cage of gray and all I want is to come home now. The trees you say to see and be seen but I see them now as imitations; is it a trick to make me feel at home amidst this war?

In examining my existence I see only one way home; I require that way home now. The air isn’t clean and the energies are obscene and the fire that fuels the cars is from the same fire that burns bruised hearts and I am begging you please let me come home now.

A man walks by; did you send him my way? He says ‘what a beautiful day’ and I wonder if like the trees he sees that I am not so naive; he wants to sell me temporary peace, but I know better and so my eyes are facing up at the sky and I think that maybe it doesn’t go on forever; maybe its all fake and above it is a ceiling made of plastics and metal grates and there is someone like me looking down and laughing at the misery and sadness I create and I just want to go home now; please.

And the voice, it says to enjoy the mundane; no matter if it is real or fake or a ploy or one giant mistake; I am here and that’s the game; to find a plane where I can feel at home despite the craze.

In examining my existence I see that there is only one, only one way home.

-”This is for all them girls who have ever been made to feel ugly by an even uglier man”. – Violet

 I told a man to go fuck himself today; it was after he looked me deep in my eyes and whispered those sweet sweet words. It was after we made love. It was after he revoked the meaning of every meaningful thing he had ever revealed to me. It was after he draped a cloak around his secret vulnerability and reacted like the coward who fires his gun before the bear begins to charge; it was after he looked me deep in my eyes and whispered those nasty, nasty words. Ya’ll know what I mean, no matter the actual content it was the way he said it; I mean, he said a million things and acted a hundred colorful ways but I absorbed only the base line of his poisonous message and it went something like this: “boom boom, I don’t want you in my life, boom boom, I don’t want you in my life, boom boom…”. I felt it. It hurt. I felt ugly. I felt small. I felt like runnin’ and divin’ into the coldest water to freeze the growth of sensitivity and pain, but I didn’t. I just swallowed and smiled and said, “its alright boy. You are the last brother from the tribe of indifferent men that I will ever dance with. I can say a proper goodbye now. Thank you for the challenge mister, now go fuck yourself”.

 This is gon’ be my new way, I think, makin’ it my bus’ness to know where those men come from, and tellin’ ‘em how I truly feel. Ain’t like I’m doing nothin’ wrong, I mean I ain’t hurtin’ nobody really. It ain’t my problem if he takes it personally, right? I’m just livin’ my life is all, and he should know better anyhow. Its like, what do you think is gon’ happen when you wear your selfish expectations as openly as your troubled grin? I ain’t here to please nobody! I ain’t layin’ down the right to bear myself, no way am I gon’ spread my legs kindly so he can have a taste of true power. I ain’t givin’ nothin’ to nobody that ain’t already pourin’ freely from the flow of things; why force myself further? Ain’t enough you’ve got that girl between your legs you wanna sew her up after you done, you wanna brand your name like a pretty little scar that she’ll forever wear as a reminder that she’s a missin’ a piece of her heart to you.

 I’ve been had and I’ve been a means to an end for many a mischievous man but I say enough! They made me, ya know, as a girl comin’ up in this world, tricked by every fake kiss and every false prophecy spoken from the filthy grave of his soiled dreams; I believed that love was when your name felt safe in the mouth of a well-respected man. Uh, uh, no way; and now I’ve paid my dues and I have been God-honored with the authority to love nobody but myself, and if the mosquitoes want a taste of my blood then let them have it; they’ll prick the skin of another man soon, and that will be my victory when the shaft of his cock is swollen with regret of having behaved a devil’s fool; guilt itches, my friend. Itch it long and good, watch how it changes you, I’ll wear a rosy dress to celebrate the rise and fall of your oozing fantasies, ha! I’ll bite harder than any alligator I swear, I’m tired of resting in the swamps next to other second-hand ladies; through rouge and globs of lip paint they slur from too many sips of moonshine while the moonlight shines on their tears that the water beast dries with his yellow eyes.

 I ain’t one them girls who jus’ wanna man, ya hear? I ain’t wanna sit ’round, and sip tea and talk about fancy things with lace, and whisper lyrics and batter my eyes and smell nice things and have nice things: I ain’t lookin’ for nothing from you: not acceptance nor approval, not a warm blanket or a humble bed, not a compliment or a dare, not nothin’ you can do to change me slightly, not no way for you to keep me comin’ round cause I dance to the beat of distant drums, harmonic gifts of direction granted by higher things, higher than the way you feel when you see me smile that smile that ain’t got nothin’ to do with you, not no more; I’m stronger than I seem, grace is not weak but tender like a mother lion with her cubs. Don’t you know boy? When spirits are suppressed, when they are confined, ya see, they revolt to any extreme; the spirit knows only how to be itself and it will do so under any condition, under any circumstance, whether you speak its language or not it will rise within and swell like the tides of the sea when the full moon calls. It’s like, you can take a person and you can train them and mold them and teach them how you want them to be, you can tell them that some things jus’ ain’t right and others are plain wrong, but it ain’t no use; you only gonna make a murderer, or a liar, or a rapist, or a drunk; stiflin’ energies morph and manifest in unwholesome ways when left to rot on the shelves of a restricted heart.

 So, boy, I release myself from the bonds that have held me down; turns out they were of my own makin’; but ya’ll can’t convince me to stitch them again. No way, I have a voice as strong as a million angry bees and though my soul is lyin’ on the side of a road a ruby stone in my chest has been graciously restored. So again, i”ll say it with mighty conviction, those sweet sweet words I’ll whisper in your ear; “go fuck yourself”.

4th Step

I know why you wear your glasses to bed: you’re afraid you wont see what’s coming when you’re asleep, that if you open your eyes and have a moment to react you may react wrongly because you cant see…I know this…I watch you sleeping, I see those eyes moving in the space on your face while you wait at the edge of dreams for a reason to engage your reflexes and then boom! Too late; the nightmare is real and blood is already pouring; if only you had been wearing your glasses…

And what diet have you consumed that has left you so bloated with fear? Who has your heart in a bind and who before has pricked it a million times with nasty needles of demented perfection? You seek approval in all forms, wanting to be wanted by all people in all ways. And when you fail to find that source of acceptance you suffer a gentle stab, you  feel it sink in and slide around, you feel it grow around your heart and change you, you feel it arrest your thoughts and turn them so that they are unfamiliar and throbbing like your pulse that sets the tone for your prize of resentment.

You will cry now, wont you? Remembering the pleasant taste of freedom, a memory vague and teasing, like the flavor of strawberry licked from the fingers of your vacant sweetheart. Why do you source the misery from which you run? Is there a place to phrase the pickled prayers of a self-anointed princess? You are nothing, you think. You have nothing and you come from people who have less still. So go, then, leave this world like you’ve wanted before; the skin of your wrists is already written with scar tissue gossip of a lonely end.

And to whom are you now attached, I wonder? From whom do you leech the vibrant energy of approval? Does he say ‘I love you?’ And what do you reply? You might sit still and soften those eyes behind the forged glass that shields your sinister intentions; so afraid to be alone you keep him with your smile all the while you silently repeat the mantra of mortal insecurity in your mind: ‘please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me….’ You’re so afraid to be alone! The form of the man is no matter so long as he craves you, cradling your virginity or catering to your finite innocence with the force of his fist; to you it is no matter. The kind one thinks of himself the answer to your history of abuse, the ill-tempered one sees you as weak and sees him a savior who violently demands recognition of his heroic cock.

Is it security you seek? Daily sessions of unconditional affirmation? Like congealed animal fat the weight of your uncertainties hangs in pockets of condensed self-pity, you roam the earth a victim of the hurt you have been prescribed by the crooked sources of power in your sick society: you believe them though all they have done is reduced you to another consumer casualty waiting to wear an American flag around the grave;  in death you’ll be as valued as the cost of your tomb. Until then, I hate the way your lips coil around the words of your favorite pop-star icon.

I know you fight it, you’re wrapped in your own skin shaking like a dying dog, a look of anger drips wet with worry and is smeared across the canvas of your nighttime portrayal. It is pain to descend into darkness, to release the demons you have all day concealed with a half-ass smile and neon bright words that defend your make-believe bliss. For you life is a thin dress of sugar which coats a swollen seed of malcontent.

What would you need to release the beast? How long until you give birth to your morbid offspring; a word or a glance or a thought or a sentence that spews like vomit from your soured insides? You deliver unto the world that with which it has you impregnated; coils of hurt, anger, hatred, and grief. Your life is a permanent gestation of a broken fetus with a broken heart; your child wears the crown of thorns long before it’s born, she is doomed to carry the burden of a thousand stubborn mistakes; thank you, mother murderer.

So what now? You’ll sleep eventually, wearing the pink frames or cuddling them close to the scabs on the knuckles of your graying hands, awaking to feed your aging addictions, one by one they surface and you place them in line, one after another, each one fulfilled only brings you closer to the next; you cherish your alcoholic itinerary and so long as you’re awake you function like a machine driven by a programmed response that has you constantly inputting random data and outputting arbitrary waste, the sad cycle of someone convinced they are deprived and only partially a person.

So you learn of things which only jumble spiritual reception and from it you produce no good action except the action to deny that divinity exists outside of dreams. You are alone, you prefer to be alone, so no one can ever get close enough to learn why it is that you wear your glasses to bed… but I know, I watch you as you sleep…

Lessons in ‘thought’ or spirituality or cosmogony generally do not imply a financial return: it will not help me get a raise, nor a job for that matter, nor can I translate such studies into ‘class credits’.  And on the other hand (when you think as the Dohgon would have you think), it absolutely will.

A lesson in spirituality is never a waste, a lesson in unlearning the lessons which have made me so cynical and self-seeking is more important than the beating of my own heart. This is what it has come to: unlearning, deconstructing, demolishing so that we may re-learn, reconstruct, and reinforce new methods of thought; new ways of thinking which don’t produce such heinous individuals in a society full of poison and torture, of grief and hopelessness, of hurt and pain, of poverty and greed and degradation and ignorance.

We must return, retrace the light so we may find the darkness, as the Dohgon says. Though it is still unclear as to how this is meant to happen, believe me, it will be worth the effort, as the world around us continues to die and the demand for change is no longer an afterthought. As I sit here with a red, yellow and green band wrapped around my ankle and engaged in conversation with an African refugee, my spirits are assured, my mission is clear: fall into the arms of the universal science, and leave your western ways to rot.

Halfway to Half Dome

Like satin veils of white and gray, streams of water coat the flat surface of majestic hillsides of Yosemite National Park, scaling hundreds of feet to feed the violent rapids below. At the Pines Campgrounds, people build their temporary homes between the immense heights of conifer trees in a valley which displays the subtle striations of color on the surrounding faces of granite cliffs, sharing this land with a variety of birds and rambunctious ground squirrels. A lazy stretch of the Merced River flows besides this outdoor civilization, and the perpetual motion of water meeting rock create a soothing elixir of sound and an environment ideal for relaxation and meditation. The rustic pathways that comprise the perimeter of the camp site individually offer a unique perspective of Yosemite’s terrain, some seeming desolate and wild ,others populated by dozens of smiling tourists eager for a photo opportunity. Once the sun has slipped behind the peaks of the majestic mountains, an aura of tranquility overcomes the recreation area as darkness creeps, and all is at rest aside from a few voices in the distance, the crackling of pit fires scattered across the landscape, and shadows of fellow campers illuminated by the glow of the moon.