We aren't what we say we are

Blueberry Bliss, Ginger Vitality

A godess's homesickness for the romanticized

I couldn’t look up any longer; I couldn’t speak up any louder. I just lay on the ground and imagined myself in some distant landing. If I closed my eyes, could I make you and all of this disappear? My pulse sighed in rendered dreams of energy; there I was, my final release to therapeutic presence. Immersed, faded and invisible like one who’s already experienced and channeled. But I haven’t experienced, I have yet to channel. Yet I feel so old. I feel so withered and old. A raisin in the sun, a child looking up at Shel Silverstein’s pizza sun. But I remember being young where the sun engulfed everything you touched and felt and said and cried. I dreamt of nothing because I knew of nothing to dream. Time didn’t find me; it didn’t stalk me until I knew pain. I could cry and it would be the dark ages. I was so young and already eye level with the sun and moon—friends of transcendence in flight. The must of my grandmother’s brown and white lace curtains stuck to my skin and eyes, relics of a golden age where rock-and-roll and desert sun made waves in the sand, and oasis’s in velvet pools and string bean rope trees. Because there you were. There it was. Time meant nothing, it didn’t weigh this energy of now, brief and fleeting and, hold on, step back, cheap. Hang on, wait up. What’s wrong? I’m not now. These tears can’t be taken away. You can’t just keep on saying that someday, someday now I will find a way to forget those goddamn hearts and flowers. Because what if it will all only take this one day, these one tears to say that you aren’t alone in what you fear and what sears every nerve and childish cry. Why did I care so much about that key and the lock to the aged, rosewood Grandfather clock? I would follow the swing, and hope to grow as tall as the wall of vanillin books, ripened with age and travels and voices. Goddammit relinquish control—let me fall and hit hard. Let the sand wash me away so I can sail the seven moons. The sky tells us we can’t go back, but we can live between the two, night and day and eye level all the same. The yin and yang of a child’s heart, or maybe just homesickness for the romanticized.  I’ve realized that it wasn’t the specificity of time, but the release of time itself, the ignorance and innocence of a child in relation to an era. The road only went for some time until it was you and the wild—people were wild, not tamed and estranged. What a calamity to no longer feel the wind’s silky wrap, watch lips kiss smoke, feel the sparseness of change and a pay phone, the haunting of all those people before you reaching for the call of home, honey and wine to nameless, weathered voices.

Sweet child of mine, you feel that your hair has grown too fierce and coarse for the comfort of a mother’s hands, soothing the tangles and brushing away your gasping fears that seem to yank you to the floor in a broken water depth, a dragging jerk that pulls you fighting, a cold recluse with no breath. You can’t seem to escape the sea, lying broken in your mother’s hands. Sweet child, you’ve seemed to have forgotten those healing hands, touching your forehead in a pause of hope and light, honing those sun rays and the moon’s pale, seeping chill until breath returned, your chest fell heavy and still. You weren’t blue, you weren’t black, you were coral peach, the dip between the two. Sweet child, you were taken by the sky. You wish to feel the braid of a mother’s hands, the stories of nostalgia and its cratered heart; you wish to smile all the smiles you’ve heard and seen and felt. Lived all the moments, black and white, coral peach, cradled in the lights of stop and go; a mother’s hands balmy sweep and butterfly dance through turbulent and anxious tidal waves, until you are soothed, you are healed. 

Wild skies, freed hearts seek solace, “will you ever win?” Those words carpeted the Shirley curls of orange shag, the strung guitar that my mother once held in gypsy rhythm, individual and soul, and me, healing those strings in smiles I’ve heard and seen and felt. Nostalgia fluttered and like melding stars in poetry, glowed like the goddess itself. I was surrounded, a child dripping in nectar calling for the monarch butterflies until they amassed as fields of flowers in the sky—their arched wings each a broken piece of holy, stained glass drenched in golden light, each a broken, wild smile of heaven—the true cathedral in all its pure divinity. I looked up, I spoke, I was overcome.

Listen while reading: http://crystallizedhope.tumblr.com/post/16207156171/crystallineknowledge-her-breath-is-the-wind

Coffee Shop Text

I’m growing hard and cold in this tribal world. I don’t think you could say I am happy. With this constant chatter of unrest delving to rest inside my head; they are putting up camp, I can tell, they can say. There’s this perpetual expectance from society of what to be, how to say and why to live. I don’t know if I can ever grow to understand this type of living. I grip Excalibur inside the fist of my hand; it hangs loosely from a silver cord around my neck, claiming to have been pulled from the formidable rock where no one else stood to understand that it takes grace and patience, not sure strength. It’s as if I’m waiting to be saved, to be sure of protection from all of this pounding energy—consuming, eating away my vitality. Who’s ever really sure of their existence? I want to be told I am okay, I am going to make it through the day, that I am good enough. I want to be held and be seen as true. I’ve been thrown out, no packed bags but the clothes on my back. I have no home now, left to wander through tempos unheard of. It’s weird how people look at you, like they know where you stand. People have forgotten the language of telepathy, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t communicate, wordless. We aren’t ever really alone, because in some sense or another, people always know what you are feeling. They meet you--sad, betrayed, this deep seed of resentment and label you as unhappy, depressed. No one can explain how they know specifically, they just do. It’s too much for the comprehension of words. I don’t know how I feel about that. I could easily leave this barren place, with people who feed jealousy and fight for the funniest funny, an attack on the weakest link, but I wonder if it would change anything. Would the people really be different, would I make friends and feel content? Maybe green really is my color, and that is what I needed to realize. I guess I am just tired of feeling below the rest of society, when I think so much too. No one seems to understand my need to be at one of those colleges where thinking is revered, books a well sought-after perfume. I want to sit in those grand libraries; you know one of those brick, home-in-front-of-a-warm-crackling-fire ones? I want to live there. Create a home there. Drink my coffee, study and sleep there. Modern isn’t my thing. Ironic, when journalism is on its last limb, surviving by the newest new—the search for obliterating human communication. Give me a typewriter and that will do. Storytelling must never die. Faces must never fade.

I think confrontation is needed. To go out and be okay with falling down, once, twice or numerous times, you know. We must be open to meeting so many people, even if we don’t necessarily talk to them. To just interact with their energy is good enough. To sit in the open, alone, is the bravest of all. Because you are telling the world, I am okay by myself. I am okay meeting you. We may all be suffering, but I am still okay.  I love this feeling of essential rebellion.

A farewell to nobility in loneliness

The leaping woman arrives in an ambulance of starlight. Take heed young warrior, wanderlust vagabond—these stars burn for only so long; they can fall and die en masse of clouded fire, its grip reaching for a death experienced together, not alone like everyone else. Make a wish, or this search will be your downfall; see there, light-years scrape across battered and bruised skies encased in flaming trails of golden chariots. They didn't race ahead, star-bright, to fall in vain. Once, only once in a lifetime, myths braced for the constellation of gods splattered among the cosmos. Oh, see it pass you by now. Adrift a torrent of wind and sea and deserted dust storms, that leaping woman bathed in starlight felt as if she was rusting as burnt and red as iron. She was no "holy city," so she looked to the moon and waited for its milky cradle, a boat in a rather black, brash sea—a sailor’s friend in Poseidon’s tidal pull. Waves of stars took its shot, they rose up and hit like a tsunami's sucker punch until she clung to the orbit of impermanence. Her family always told her about the principles of practice, but what did they do other than call her a kind of lazy susan, waiting for the heavens to guide her home. So she leapt and she fell, and she snagged and cracked with each broken branch, until she lay still, very still, most like those monastic monks, waiting for the brush of enlightenment and the tongue of its tempters beneath a tree and its grassy roots. She was on the roof of the world, her name known only as Ngari, the remains of a celebrated and ruined kingdom, a place for the rather vast and few. Magical, divine—a final state of nirvana—a place to pilgrimage and find what all those stars lost, alone "to fly high and never fall." No need for another emergency call, this was her final search for home. 

Dear Journal

I have my days of worshipped dreams; wishing, living in New York’s lights, Europe’s sacred grace. But today in Phoenix wasn’t so bad. Phantogram in concert was more than anything I have ever experienced before. It was trance-like. In a small urban venue, I closed my eyes and swayed back and forth to the local beats that grazed each ray of light—in sync with the crowd’s pulse. Tonight I felt okay, more than okay, I felt healed. It’s been a long time. I danced how I wanted to dance. I was alive, crazed, one with the music, one with the moment. Encore and all, however, it had to end. I gripped my leather jacket and braced for the new cold that has finally found the Arizonan desert and called its fall. My ears were numb from harmonized souls, but there I was, throbbing in a high of something utterly unforgettable, something I could finally call an experience worth something. 

There is breath in the things you cannot see, in what cannot last

Where do moon tides dream when you lie beneath homemade stars? Deep inside, wear off the devil inside, and just breathe. It comes in waves now, that pulling feeling to go back, back in time. The streets curve as you move. There we all are. Moving, trying not to slip and break the liquid glass. Mirrors to another place, another universe. And we think, we are fragile. This is all fragile. Tiptoeing hesitance, cutting the blade in a perfect figure eight. Who’s keeping count? Landing on our feet, we are the edge of the water’s sleep. Nothing more than autumn leaves breaking with each footed grace, pumpkins lining the streets, young faces painted in midnight disguise. A revolution of its time, before the snow covers summer grass and fallen color, and skies darken with the bitter cold. The desert doesn’t seem to know so much of a season’s passing. Time slows and dust settles in a velvet cloth. Mountains are to be climbed, endless roads have to end somewhere. To get there. To rest there. To watch there. Away from those lights and those people. To just lie there with open eyes screening stars so real and far away for some message of salvation—some message just for you and that magic carpet.  A wolf’s call can sound there in the calm of the night without fear or danger, just wary like us. And loyalty. Oh, where we just question and they just breathe. Where they act; weightless, breathless, firelight free. Dust passes in a divine trance—quickly enveloping above, frozen, thick and muddy within. We turn to one another, each a ghost in some slow and precise dimension. Our voices, a muffled dance; our ears, a symphony  ablaze with a droning hum. We etch our name into the white sky, hoping to paint the sunset somewhere above us. To feel again in that moment, alive. Like we are the only ones that made it out from some broken apocalypse, under siege. Maybe everything follows a flight plan. Plane after plane landing and leaving, never breaking off-course into a new city, a new year, a new you. Every person following one another, hoping for something better, scraping the dust of far above stars, just breathing together.

Sure there are things we cannot see, but that doesn’t mean we cannot feel what is free. I wish I could feel it all for you.