Respect Yourself

Read Full Post »

Can’t Find My Way Home

Read Full Post »

Cowboy

Afterwards I was never quite sure how he got in.

I mean, I know how he got in, but I never saw him enter. I was alone, and then suddenly I was not, and he there at my elbow. Too close, too swiftly, like an spook. He seemed to change location without need of walking. Not there, then there. Close and almost overlapping, but strangely at a distance.

He had a definite physique, in fact I noticed because it seemed made of hard sinew, and that was clear despite the long sleeves and collar buttoned up tight. But I had a strange sensation of water or vapor as he stood near, and something else I couldn’t put my finger on; something that fogged my mind and called to mind a Peter Green song, Green Manalishi. Absurd. This guy was a cowboy.

He had the graceful stride and seat of a horseman, and a very slight bowlegged stance. He wasn’t wearing boots, and why would he be? He wasn’t on a horse, just shopping, just looking. I could tell at a glance anyway. The man had it in his blood, not his boots. He would not be scraped off easy, if he had a mind not to be.

In a million years I could not tell you what his face looked like, yet I would know him again, without knowing why. I think I’ve known of him all my life and this moment was just proof of it. He knew me too, although he never admitted it. Just kept playing that tune in my head, and talking, talking, until I wasn’t sure what he was saying.

There was one moment where I was clear, and it only came because I realized that what he’d said was a plea. Words, lists, delivered so matter-of-factly, nonchalantly even, with a Devil May Care tone, which is what waved the red flag.

He was working me! Intoning a code so subtly ingrained on me in another life, one I’d long left behind, but one he had certainly not forgotten. He’d been only waiting, biding time. And the time was now.

I jerked my head back towards his voice and saw a shimmer. The dark glasses had never come off, obscuring information I needed to stay present and in myself. They met his cheekbones and never moved or shifted but seemed part of his face. The longer I looked, the more they seemed the face itself, until I realized there was no face at all. I sucked in my breath, mouthing a scream.

Suddenly the focus snapped and he was just a cowboy again. What had I been thinking? He was talking again, using actual human words, and even laughed once. I shook away the cold I felt, then realized that no, I was actually hot, my skin prickly from the heat. I thought of the desert, and of fire. I saw him lick his lip, curling it. He was so very polite, but I imagined a fang there.

For just a moment he had made me feel sorry for him, had moved me to tears with his litany of woes. He’d almost made me touch him in some blind need to comfort, to ease the agonized hunger, the need he brought. Need that would never be filled, no matter who touched him.

I closed my eyes, telling myself my own name, remembering.

“Goddamn, are you listening?”

“No” I thought, opening them. And he was gone. I never saw him leave. And I know it’s funny, but I heard his spurs across the room.

Read Full Post »

Mess of Dreams

I stumbled onto you

A picture, no less

In fact there were three

 

Grinning in one

Head thrown back

Softness apparent

New to me

 

Black shades the next

Guitar aimed

Like an arrow

At her heart

 

But the last

The soul heavy tired eyes

I remember these

Even now

 

So old

For so young

A man

 

The one thing I never got

When I wrote this

The lines etch now

Just like yours

And I wonder why

I never thought it

The one thing I never wanted

Those lines sketched

Just like my own

 

I took them with me, you know

When I left

Maps to my life

A mess of dreams

Songs we laid down

You gave to me

We rolled them in our sleeves

Maybe I stole them

If you say so

I’ll believe it

 

What kind of heart would be mine

If I covered all the soft spots now

With a stronger love

Built of more serviceable

Materials

And I could guarantee

It would no longer fail

Or leak

Or bleed

 

I tumbled into her

A picture, no less

More than three

 

I grinned in one

My head thrown back

Softness apparent

New even to me

 

Black shades the next

A needle aimed

Like an arrow

At my heart

 

But the last

The soul heavy tired eyes

You resemble these

Even now

 

So old then

For so young

A woman

A man

So young were we

Read Full Post »

The Devil Without Horns

No, you would have shunned her

Had she not

Ever scornful

Of innocence

 

It was the contrast

You dug

Ever the enigma

Of labels

 

You couldn’t pin her

Down

Not really

Even as she tried

To define herself

She proved this

Even as she swore

Undying loyalty

Ever yours

You knew

 

She would never be

One thing

Or another

 

She bared

Her many faces

Truth is

You liked it

 

Without her devils

Without her angels

You would have spit her out

Quickly

 

Now don’t complain

About the horns

 

                                                  —inspired by words from Uncle Tree

Read Full Post »

Seeker

So, you’re still out there

Too driven to die

Like you said you would

 

Age happens to the best of us

What’s left, once it does,

And you’ve never learned

How to live?

 

Do you look for something, still?

Were you ever really looking?

Or, just trying not to see

 

For all your self seeking

You haven’t gone very far

At all

 

In fact,

You’ve forgotten

What you had started to know

Read Full Post »

Collected Perceptions

Now that you’ve taken everything

Tell me how does it feel to need more

Now that you’ve drank your fill

Tell me how does it feel to be bored

Now that you’ve spent all your time

How do you know you’re too late

Now when you empty your pockets

How do you sort your mistakes

 

So you put them on a shelf

Like you put me on a shelf

And you spend all your life in a haze

So you add to your collection

Of sideways perceptions

And you say she was just a phase

 

And you put me on a shelf

Like you put them on a shelf

And erase all those dreams in a blaze

So you add to your collection

Your toys of perception

You pretended to throw away

 

Now that you’ve taken everything

Tell me how does it feel in your soul

Now that you’ve stolen the best years

How does it feel to get old

Now that you’ve used up their lives

How will your ego be fed

Now when you see me watching

Who do you see in your head

 

You put me on a shelf

Like you put her on a shelf

Your relics lined up in a row

But you forget to mention

Her collected perceptions

Easily rival your own

 

So put her on a shelf

Like you put them on a shelf

And live out your life in a daze

Add to your collection

Your toys of perception

Each in her special place

Read Full Post »

Just a Kid

When you’re a teenager, you think you know everything. You also think you are indestructible.

I look at kids that age, and I see children. But once in a while, I see one who also reminds me of me. A certain squint in one eye, a stance, a way of breathing. Not willing to wait, be held back; accept what she is told; that it’s for her own good, that she doesn’t know what’s good for her, that really, she knows nothing yet at all. Something about them, these individuals, these upstarts, calls me and makes me want to look away even while I am looking in, into them, into myself.

Who speaks to them? Do they have a net? Someone who will remind them of what’s important, of what must be held onto, even while they let them fall? A someone who plants a seed of meaning that might grow when there is solid ground once again?

Or is there a someone who rages at their impudence, their rush to taste all that waves at them from life? Who tells them always that they are out of step, that there will be Hell to pay; that they disappoint and embarrass with their refusal to just be children when they are already miles across the line from any “just”?

You can’t hold back the tide. Everybody knows that. Yet still, we have all tried to, somewhere.

When that damn breaks, it breaks. It just will. Go. Where it will.

I like the idea of a breakwater, maybe. A way left still for the water to go around. A buffer, not a bubble. Bubbles break. Then, they are no help at all.

 

Most people believe that if they are not controlling their children, they are doing them a disservice, being irresponsible. They think that whenever a child goes astray, the parents must not have controlled them very well, but often, the opposite is true. It is in that controlling that one such as I was ceases to hear anything at all that might be useful. She begins to know only that everything she wants is wrong, bad, and forbidden. At this point, who is she willing to be? If she is a strong willed one, she tries to put her will to conforming. Of course she fails. She never was a conformist, and it is not the trait that made her “good”. That was simply her own natural desire to please.

Now there is rebellion. Rejection. The only restoring of herself she knows so far—the move away from all restraints.

This child believes that she will die if confined. The only real strengths she has so far wither under the bindings of familial care, so it is with a kind of survival instinct that she separates herself.

 

I think of individuals, who in their quest for explanation, blame, or exemption, have made the statement that I chose everything I encountered.

At the risk of splitting hairs, I must qualify this. Ultimately, perhaps we even choose who we come into this world as. Some say we do. But it’s like telling a person they have chosen to have Cancer—another thing some actually believe.

What’s the point? All that matters is whatever choices come before us everyday. I was given new choices. I took them. Some lose their choices, along the way.

 

What else matters to me now is this—in trying so hard to keep something the same, in protecting those we love from all their own choices, instead of protecting in ways we really can, we do them a disservice, and ourselves as well.

We forget to honor in them their ability to discern, or even allow that ability to ever develop. Soon, choices are so much less about what is wanted or needed, but about just having a choice at all.

I myself clung to that; just having any ability to choose anything. Even if my choice was what my poison would be, even if my choice was who or what would control me, it seemed better than obedience to something I didn’t believe in at all. If I had to be untrue to myself, let me be the one who chose how.

Was this a mistake? Surely I paid an awful price for my choices. I had no idea, at the time, how long term the effects would be on me. Long after this chapter was far, far away, I would know the dents on my soul that I could never push out. My form is forever shaped by the things I’ve seen and known, and I have wished them undone so many times. I have wished for my innocence back, and grieved the losses that came from allying myself with powers that nearly destroyed me.

 

So I’ve had to ask myself, who would I be, had I chosen differently? Would I have found an easier way to move through society? Would I have come from my youth unscathed and unscarred by things most people are sheltered from in their young years? Would I have grown up not missing parts of my heart and soul?

Would I have learned to become the conformist I fought so hard against being? Perhaps life would have been easier, softer, and years later I would have paid with a simple and boring mid-life crisis instead of posttraumatic stress disorder. Perhaps when age caught up to me I would have been happy to have played safe.

I really don’t know. Regret is rather useless at this point. As one friend is fond of saying, “It is what it is.” Or, as my mother puts it, “You can’t unscramble the egg.” Well put.

 

When I see her now with that squint in one eye, I know there’s not much I can say about this. If there is, I’ve never figured out what it is. But my reaction is always the same; I’m drawn to her like I am to my own reflection the first time I see part of my life newly reflected in my face. You know, those feelings and events that take up residence there but sometimes take years or decades to move in. It has indeed taken decades for me to realize I am looking at me when I see her, that one with the defiant stance, the stare, the breath raging just beneath the calm of the skin.

What can I tell her? What would she listen to, remember, when the walls tumble down and she only needs to choose something herself, by herself, for herself?

 

I admire the delicate artistry of her new tattoo, chosen for great personal meaning and beauty, a symbol of her individuality and feminine strength. This is no peer pressure tattoo, but completely original, a collaboration between tattoo artist and herself, one of a kind.

The placement of the tattoo is significant, and affords concealment. Like carrying a secret talisman for life; one she can choose to share or not, but does not wear to the world. I can appreciate her choice to express herself with something so beautiful, yet so personal.

 

I make her tell me all her makeup tips, for I can see already that she has a talent for doing things her own way; ways that work better than the ways “they” say to do things.

I ask her, as I do each time, if she’s written anything lately.

I don’t encourage her to run off, like she is wont to do. I just ask her what she hopes to find. I talk about what it’s like to come home, what it really means to any person, “coming home”.

I ask her about her dreams; ask her what she would ultimately like to be doing, down to the last detail. I ask her about time; what time is it in her life? What would she like to have happen in the next year or two or three to give her the choices she craves? I know that for her, right now, it’s all about the right to choose for herself.

Mostly, I just listen, because I can. She is not my daughter. She is not my blood. I’m not compelled by duty to make her “shape up”.

She is just one of those kids I look at and I know, she’s not “just” a kid.

She is like water, unstoppable, flowing where she will. I don’t want to dam her up. I can’t. I don’t want to fill her up with fear, daring her to fail. And of course, I am afraid she will. We all have to fall down.

I want to be there when she scabs both knees. Girls like us always scab them both, because we run way too fast. For the sheer fun of it, for the chase, for the escape, for the momentum we can’t stop sometimes. I want to be there to tell her the scars will soften.

I tell her I like that she is herself, and not like everyone else. I don’t want to see her spirit broken, all though I can see where it might break one day; she will not settle for safety either. She will go places she ought to stay away from, just to know she went, just to taste her freedom.

I want to be there when she comes home, wherever she finds that home to be. When she does find it, she’ll know it, for herself and by herself, and she won’t wonder if someone else has made it up.

After a while she’ll lose her squint, but one eye will always seem to be a bit more open than the other, and she will have a crooked smile.

She will look and see and talk and smile with the side that is herself, and the side the world wants, so it can see her, hear her. And she will smile a lot. And when I see her, we will share our crooked smiles and say, “Hey, it’s good you’re home”.

Read Full Post »

In Your Hands

[So Long; Epilogue]

 

You’re studying

Matching words and dates

Looking for a way

To make it all make sense

 

You’re combing

Catching links and cues

Chasing after trails

That lead me back to you

 

That’s my book

In your hands

That’s the story

You can’t understand

That’s my book

On your shelf

That’s my story

You’ve kept for yourself

 

And I’m just letting you

Now I’m just letting you

 

You’re reading

The pages of my soul

Charting the past

By what you don’t know

 

You’re writing

The chapter of you

Making your mark

With what you can’t prove

 

That’s my book

In your hands

That’s my story

You can’t understand

That’s my book

That you stole

That’s my story

You’ve bought and sold

 

And I’m just letting you

Now I’m just letting

You go

 

Why did it come to this?

What will you do when the line doesn’t fit?

 

You’re reading

The pages of my soul

Mapping the past

You think is your own

 

You’re keeping

The words you can’t hold

Finding the last

Verse that you wrote

 

And I’m letting you

I’m just letting it

Go

 

I’m just a book

On a shelf

I’m just a story

You want for yourself

I’m just a book

In your hands

I’m just words

You can’t understand

 

And I’m just letting

Them go

I’m just letting go

I’m just letting you

Go

I’m just letting

You know

I’m just letting you

Now I’m just letting go

 

 [So Long]

http://oracleofthepearl.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/so-long/

Read Full Post »

The Why

There is no understanding “Why”.

Trying to comprehend, with a compassionate heart, the incomprehensible; the compassionless. It will make you crazy. 

All that needs understood is more stark and brutal than I like to be, but it is the truth still; there are people in the world who cannot be filled or satisfied. Ever. The closest they come is momentary, and it comes from control, which makes them important, makes them matter.

They don’t care who they hurt or whether it’s wrong to do the things they do. It’s all about them; there is no real concience inside. Only the rules and tools they have learned to get them what they need and want. This emptiness, combined with a lack of remorse, compassion, concience, makes for a very hungry and potentially vicious creature. Some are more talented in feeding themselves than others, and not all who lack a concience become criminal. It all depends on what they want, what gives them that momentary, fleeting sense of satisfaction, but it will always be about what they want over anything else that should matter. Especially you. Especially if you have something they want. And they often do want what they cannot have.

Many wear their emptiness , their discontent, as some badge of honor, their persona one of being so rich, creative, intelligent, and individual that the mundane and real life challenges and joys of other people do not apply to them, do not touch them. They are not sheep and have no need to deceive themselves with the banal like those asleep people.

Many also become adept at displaying the traits of actually having compassion, for they study others and learn that it’s a great cover for not giving a shit about anybody at all. They also learn it get’s them alot of ground with the most vulnerable of marks.

For the truly discontented, the misunderstood, the vulnerable, this blend of learned tactics in the concienceless can cause us to volunteer, or at least repeatedly abide destructive and selfish behavior, even as our instincts scream at us  to RUN AWAY. Because, it seems, someone finally understands us. It’s even worse if you have ever been a “runner”, for now you want to, for once, just stay. And they want you to stay, return, let them in, because you are their source of food. Emotional, spiritual, literal, whatever. You are a source, nothing more. Yes, that’s brutal, and always true to the sociopath.

I say “us”, because I have been this one; one who was dragged into a pit so deep and wide I could not see the sky; all because I believed I could apply understanding to another who is motivated by twisting people into mental and spiritual pretzels. My worst mistake; trying to put myself in their shoes, when it can’t be done. It’s like believing a snake is not a snake, but a human that slithers. A snake is a snake and does snake things. My interpretation of the snake has nothing to do with it’s snake-ness, and never did.

Here’s how I healed myself, took back my life: I stopped believing the story, the excuses, the tragedy of it all, all those reasons the person hurt others, all the reasons it wasn’t their fault they did what they do, all those reasons they are “wounded”, confused, torn, jaded, and self destructive. I stopped believing in the allure, the glamor of their darkness and failures. I ignored their “potential” [which was a convenient way of covering alot of "nevers"] It is all a convenient and learned application to blur and cover their selfish destruction of everything they cannot attain, yet cannot accept responsibility for not having, because they believe they should have whatever they want. Simple. At whatever cost to you. At no real cost to themselves, besides playing the game well.

I stopped believing they are victims of their own crappy lives. Many have had crappy lives and have used what they’ve learned to create so much good. And sociopaths have no problem using every tool to their advantage when they are securing a victim to use, in fact, they can become very persistant. They are not inert, powerless, helpless. Just selfish. Just lacking in character. Just not motivated by anything but greed. Those lacks cannot be taught to one who does not want to learn them. There may be something missing in them, but there is also choice, and they’re not crazy. They do know what they’re doing.

This is not bitterness speaking, for I am long past the brush of bitterness beginning in me. I have survived the chasm of coldness, aloneness, self doubt and anguish the sociopath left me to dig out of. I grew through the pains of learning to love and trust after seeing the truth of what one like this can do. It took me a long time, but I made it; I got better, I got stronger. And I love, feel, and care as fiercely as I can. The sociopath stole from me, I won’t let him rip me off in my ability to love too. I’m alive. My heart is alive. My spirit is intact. I won’t become like he; dead inside.

Know this: they are not like us, and trying to understand will be the consumption of all efforts to understand anything, which would be better applied elsewhere. There isn’t understanding, just identifying, just seperation. Just moving on,  and becoming you again. I believe in you.

Read Full Post »