in the starlight where she wishes

in the starlight where she wishes

she walks about with him
behind her gray-green eyes behind
her crooked smile

he rattles like a gris-gris sewn
beneath her shell of flesh beneath
puckered scars

she let him burrow
she let him rest

she let his shadow linger
in the starlight where she wishes

On beauty - Journalesque

Sometimes within the mind there is a disconnect. Reality, actuality are not what is…perceived. And perceived reality, perceived actuality are your truth.

It’s more than difficult to dig yourself out of this hole.

In hindsight, however, I think I may have been an incredibly beautiful child and a lovely young woman. Not in manner, but in looks lacking mainstream ideals.

Yet no matter the affection in youth, no matter the love won or lost in marriage, (sparse and rare, what I recall),

Reality, actuality, and the truth of the matter found me only recently.

To gaze into a lover’s look, to hear one question why he had not seen how beautiful I was until that first moment of passion, to hear appraisal come in friendship from good women…

To see what was in me all along, reflected back from others…

To realize all those years I had been digging…

Finally to see the sun.

Absolute Beginner - Journalesque

Amidst the swell of a hope that springs eternal is the innate sadness of the world, for the world. The feeling first manifested, in my feeble cognition, sometime around age four. Around the same time I became aware of myself juxtaposed against the other. The other being all those people, places, things, and concepts outside me and outside that child-parent bond, that Freudian concept of family. At four I emerged from that child-bond shell, looked about, decided things were all wrong. And what does any sane child do when faced with an innate wrongness of the world? Build a new and improved shell – thicker, stronger, better – and internally weep for years over a thing I could not articulate.

Hey, we do what we do to live and get by.

My friend Matt has said I am so internalized I am unaware of others. Or something like that, though I forget precisely. He said it quite a while back. But since I think to be unaware is to not empathize, I stopped to…well, make myself more aware. My shell having shattered years before when Robert died and further as I grew, perhaps a few shards remained before I could emerge whole, and new?

We do what we do to live and get by.

And I realized that’s what was going on. When I was four and decided in my small vocabulary “the world is wrong”. But just because it was being done doesn’t make it right, what we do to get by.

So I have plucked the slightest of shards clear and licked the wounds to a shiny glow. I have emerged from my shell, not starting over, but an absolute beginner.

Globally Whole - Journalesque

I was born with bright red hair that turned platinum sometime before I was two, and has since – over the years – faded into dark blonde and come around to something akin to motley: blonde, red, black. At forty I have suddenly found two silver strands at my temple and one my brow.

Motley. American mutt of Basque, Cherokee, Irish and Adirondack and a sir-name of Portugal descent. Fourth(?) generation American? Native? With surety I can claim the recessive Irish genes are mine. I can claim them with my hazel eyes and now blonde-red hair. My skin the red of Indian – paternal and maternal. My isolationism, Basque. My passion, Portuguese? The list of labels is endless.

I am fractured. Finding myself late in life. Globally whole perhaps. Without a cultural identity. Compartmentalized.

images imprinted

She'll let the scent of him linger
long past his leaving
and the images imprinted
in the hours
serve her dutifully
on the days,
in the nights
she finds her own release
repeatedly.

now-now

I want to consume you
in the fire of flesh
and knowing,
now-now;

instead I simmer
slow and low
in a tempo
of rhythmic breathing.

I lay still,
soul-strengthened,
as the thing about me
writhes.