It Can't Only Be Me

It can’t only be me

stomach distended with cramps after kids or eating something I shouldn’t like a bread or a bit too much

it can’t only me be that sleeps on her arms
it can’t only be me in disbelief and denial
at the blood.

It can’t only be me who trips on her own life or her own traps or her own fears.

Maybe I’m not sick of it so much as I’m just sick of how I’m thinking about it or maybe I’m bleeding soon and forgot. Or maybe I’m forgetting soon and bleeding.

Have you ever dumped a cup of red clotty menstrual blood into water and seen the red mystery of it and felt some feeling with no name?

It can’t just be me who feels into the life awe burdensome beast of being in a body that has breasts and a dark womb that I can’t see that makes small lives and disposable organs and then acts normal as if it’s all “tale as old as time” but then again

Have we lived or does living invoke death and all this is actually tiny daily yin yangs any old way you slice it?

It can’t be me alone who forgets and forgets to feel and floats face down in the hens coming home to roost, the tension of opposites embodied in the moment after moment after moment of all of this.

Maybe getting out of prison and laying on the ground
maybe just being out of prison is enough and you don’t have to make something of your freedom.

Maybe do nothing or maybe that’s a cop out, energy on my life wasted because I didn’t become anything but everything.

Maybe to have a heartbeat is enough.

Maybe I don’t know how to improvise and integrate all of this but maybe it’s not only me.

nothing lasts

The bend of arm has never been like this, nor her face. Not your hands holding infinity in the palm, not these language letters making some kind of connected sense in their own kind of never before. Never particular burdens and wishes and desires held in brain or coming from elsewhere. Not you, not me, not us, not them, not any of it ever again, or since.

Ashley Thalman on Tent Talks Podcast

Tent Talks- Part One

Tent Talks- Part Two

Do I miss it? Of course I miss it.

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Thoughts on exile and the things we outgrew by Alex Caldiero. Clipped edit from, “The Sonosopher” by Torben Bernhard and Travis Low. Watch it on YouTube if it resonates.

A poets answer to “Do you miss the fellowship of Mormonism?” Any past things outgrown or excommunicated from by choice or force can take the place of the specifics here and the pain of your loss is justified.

predator

I dreamed it

sunlight bright

as lady hawk plucked

the wet winged hatchling

from mother-made nest.

I drank it

red hot and jaw clenching

in its timeless loop

of awful devouring

while there I too,

devoured.

I lay

as they cut the bulbous middle

(intestines set aside)

pulling soft screaming life from me

(hardening breasts by the minute)

to make a meal of me.

I bleed

a bucket tick tock, a clock

to cry myself dry

a crimson ridding

an inside, made out.

I tear

the skin flesh

of apple

of trout

and steal the calf’s milk for my cheese.

Lidia's Thrust

“Thrust”

Lidia Miles drowned the pages in a tidal wave of body, art, animal, element, futurepast, sex, friendship, and time, my my my my, my. 🌊

death

Death is the beginning, the cost, and the portal of rebirth 💀 📷 @themythopoetic

August Garden- In the Face of Fuck

I’m v into flash at night in the garden right now. I’d like to invite everyone out in the garden to see- that’s part of my nature. I like to hold microphones up to the thrills and pains in life.

I am so lucky! I know and meet the most interesting people, I feel loved by them, I feel safe to share.

What a thing to feel!

What fortune!

In these most recent years I’ve become a kind of a devotee to “how it feels”, more than “how it looks” or “what I should do”. When I engage should and look, I find it useful to notice which aspects of me are in the drivers seat and where it takes me.

Some of my experience in this process has been unorthodox and strange and I’ve been very worried at times I would hurt people by not being what I thought I was, or what I wanted you to think I was. It’s embarrassing to be a person! So cringy to change! Heavy is the head that crowns itself in hyper-vigilance.

When I look through a technical (stay safe) or pathological (you’re not good enough, yet) lens I am not aware of this other “feel” thing. Feel is a different vibe, so now I am practicing feeling, which is goodhard.

A few weeks ago I was processing a core memory of being hit as a child and you know what I remember most? I most remember feeling in absolute awe that after the first punch you don’t feel it anymore.

What skill!

What a perfect mechanism!

And I was right. On one side of the coin our nervous system does something protective and evolved, but this dissociative state of not-feeling as a way of life got real deep on lack and deep on numb as it worked its programming for the last 40 years.

Learning to paint has taught me that I’ve done technique (stay safe) long enough to be burned out so now I am raising the energy of expression (I am safe, I feel safe). Sometimes “feel” is good looking and smooth but often it ain’t. But then again what the fuck is “good”?

The things about us, the ways we are and were brave in what @lidiamiles calls, “the face of fuck” may be called wounds, but wounds can also be voids, voids can be filled with whatever we put there to be amplified and materialized as our lens and life.

William Blake, Staying Awake

“Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep”

– William Blake

the arrow goes where it will go

I’ve had some pretty cool experiences in my life but this one really stands out.

A group of close friends hired me, met me out at the Salt Flats and when we got there the salt flats were flooded. Water everywhere. One of our cars got stuck, we had to get towed. We pivoted together, making something out of the unexpected- beyond original vision.

Creative results aren’t beholden to the initiations that bring them into life, anymore than we live genuinely when beholden to what our parents think we should be.

We
steady the bow
and the arrow goes
where it will go.

And that’s good enough.

stein, god, there there

God, in the form of Gertrude Stein, said “There is no there there.” What a liberating and grief laden burden joy to be a human on earth and what wonderful wonders to frankly forgive “there” and “someday” or “then” and “nostalgia” and see now, now, and now as the only, only, and only.