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Liminaltraveler.livejournal.com

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/2504.html

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ljidol

LJ Idol 11: Week 7: Feckless : An Addendum

I will probably die with a pen in my hand

Trying to get some meaning even if fleeting

I've been spending my hard earned currency on lettering and calligraphy small bottles of ink holders and nibs watercolor cubes and brushes pencil caps a shiny yellow pencil case The very first superfluous thing I bought with my first paycheck from the Bookstore Cafe (almost two years ago now) was a smallish box of kinetic sand

Adapting after living a feckless existence

Meandering, uncouth and unsophisticated

I tried to live in kindness even I was aimless

And now some sort of normal-ish

Even as I’m worrying splintered fingernails down to the quick

Running them obsessively through split ends and pulling just slightly at the roots

But I am not punching walls

I’m mesmerized by the landscape sometimes Lost in thought instead of on the highway

Daydreaming

Not scheming

Because it’s beginning to take shape

A future without struggle

The dullest extremes, caught on tape

Being freeeeeee

To deviate from the plot

As a bird, as a plane, as…Alexander Supertramp

May his restless soul be at peace Born into a privilege he saw no need for

Am I minimalist if I want more? To be more than a proletariat

Working poor

Because when I say I am living paycheck to paycheck

It means I budget by the week and can’t ever plan farther ahead

It’s only the love of a generous matriarch between me and the streets

I’m so unoriginal I know

I’ve done this all before

And I’ll wake up just to do it all over again tomorrow

I am reminded of a poem

About taking the wheel of your own life

And the simple but profound message

They say I'm good with words

I sure can turn a phrase

It wasn’t just a phase

Truly fey Mutated DNA

Born with two clubbed thumbs

And two “lazy” eyes

The medical term is amblyopia alternating exotropia

strabismus the proper derogative is actually walleyed

A sideshow freak of another era

And still it drives me up the wall

having to watch most people turn their heads

to the point over their shoulder and knowing I look disinterested by default

Training myself to talk to the floor to make them less uncomfortable

It’s the mark of malevolence

The evil eye

There’s a painful but quick surgical fix

The cost of body modification out of my reach

Yet it’s the thing I think about most

when I contemplate adventures abroad

Refusing to die never having had a passport Stepping foot on distant shores

The pilgrimage of a world citizen

Landlocked by class-ism and country

Stuck in the story of small minded patriarchs

But you just want to take a long drive

To expand the tiny orb your life has become these

And by “you” I mean me

But can we just pretend we are talking about you?

Because you will always be just a little but evil

But don’t want to be a creep at parties

(If you were ever invited to parties)

You’re not a super villain just chaotic neutral

Even you don’t know what you’re about to do sometimes

It’s just that “you” know in your heart of hearts

That if you jumped, you’d fly

But it’s the voice of logic holding you back

Keeping you in reality check

Against the idealized vision

Not living up to my own expectations

Feckless!

Because we’re always talking about me and how are you?

I'm honestly in a meretricious romance with myself I'm deluding myself Still

It’s just the way of things

How time plays tricks on us

Dripping through your fingers like kinetic sand

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/2272.html

LJ Idol 11: Week 7: Feckless - A bye out post

Well I'm out (for now)

I am out of byes and a certain previous LJ Idol entry just haunted me all weekend...

(A Sestina About the Main Character - in which I used the word feckless - archived on dreamwidth)
https://codenamewanderlust.dreamwidth.org/2017/04/15/

The irony is I won that write off by default because my opponent dropped out
It continues to be one of things I am the most proud of writing

LJ Idol continues to be the reason I feel confident enough to call myself a writer, poet...wordsmith.

I am so grateful to the community even if I am not great at interacting with ya'll, I love you and will be back for second chance if/when that happens.

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/2038.html

LJ Idol 11: Week 6: Solvitur Ambulando

she's impressed, Titi E, doesn't realize that travel is a lifestyle that I have mastered.

It’s easy living on the run at all times, except this time is different, I’ll be back this time. I just need to roam. Solvitur Ambulando. I cannot sit still.

<cut>

I'm all packed already and free to spend the day saying my goodbyes and fiddling with the sewing machine. The upper thread won't catch and I can't figure out why. Eventually, I give it up as a project for my return. I end up forgetting the brass buttons for my double-breasted vest that I planned to stitch on on the bus. I tie a strip of yellow bias tape around my fresh woolie-locs in what becomes the last minute rush that she had expected and I had planned meticulously against.

Then the car breaks down on our way to the market to pick up snacks for the road. It's the radiator, we find out after almost two hours waiting in the auto shop.

I spend the time talking to my sister who had her first kid eight months earlier. I make plans to amble her way around All-Hallows.

I don't look at the clock until we get back to the house. It’s after five. There are black clouds on the horizon and I have twenty minutes left to tuck the last of all into my pack and say farewell. <i>Bendición</i>, bless me, say a prayer to keep me safe, wish me luck on the journey…I’m still not sure I believe in luck or God but their love gives me wings. Restless, persistent, rusty wings.

The sky opens, electrical white-hot bolts sizzle across the highway. The rain makes it difficult for Titi E to drive. I'm grateful that she is willing to aide my wandering addiction. I'm sad that they will still have to deal with the radiator. I am soaked from the rain but early for my bus only to find the the rules have fluctuated.

I am put on standby. The bus is full they tell me and I burst into tears, beg them to let me on, I bought my ticket a month ago…I've been at the station for over an hour…I was told we didn't have to wait in line anymore.

I am sent to customer service and I can't stop the flow of tears as I'm rerouted, given a voucher to stay at a hotel and three meal tickets to use along the way. I have to wait an hour for the shuttle to the hotel.

I take an aspirin, set an alarm for 3 a.m. and finally doze off listening to an audio-book.

I'm in the lobby before 4 and drink complimentary coffee with powdered creamer while waiting to be shuttled back to the bus station. I use a meal voucher to buy a breakfast sandwich and a chocolate milk. I almost lose my wallet but someone points it out to me. I give him a dollar and resist giving him a hug.

I sit on the floor in front of the door marked “gate B.” I get two seats to myself and get some good sleep.

I get a seat mate and can't stay awake. I want to sit in the aisle but she doesn't want to switch.

My M&M's melt in Tallahassee. I have to chase down the baggage handler to make sure my bag is put on the right bus because it's still tagged for Atlanta even though I asked many times if it would be an issue and it almost is.

I wait inside trying to win a staring contest with my anxiety. A bottle of coke I bought with the meal ticket explodes when I open it, crouched in the line behind door number 5. Wet wipes to the rescue. The baggage handler teases me as he mops it up…spilling drinks, wrongly tagged bag…I laugh, “this is the strangest Greyhound trip I've ever been on,” I say, instead of if it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all and make absolutely sure I can see my bag in the compartment of the old Trailways bus before I board. The regular greyhound bus for this route broke down and so we are without outlets, Wi-Fi and AC until Montgomery. My water bottle leaks all over my laptop bag, I haven't even made it out of Florida.

The young man across the aisle is sharing his story: just released from lockup, arrested for “gta” at 17 spent five years in county in the not so great state of stupid stupid Florida. A firecracker in the front of the bus raises morale, tells a joke as she'd heads down the aisle to the bathroom. “Anyone going to Oklahoma?” she calls out later. She's a storm chaser. She's looking for a tornado. I’d go anywhere with you baby girl the brazen part of me wants to call back. Let's chase the storms across the lower 48.

When we cross the state line into Alabama I'm on the wrong side of the bus to get a picture of the sign. The firecracker gets drunk. The smell of pot wafts from the back of the bus. The girl behind me is horrified. I'm just jealous.

After zigzagging in a northwesterly direction for 2 and 1/2 days I lose track of how many times I have to transfer. It all starts to blend together somewhere around St Louis where we have to wait for a new driver for almost three hours and I use my last meal ticket.

Somehow still, I make it to Portland in time to witness the eclipse. The journey by far greater than the destination.

I amble back to Orlando eight months later. I’ve been here for two years this time and I simultaneously want to get gone and never leave again.

My body is tired but longs for new locations.

</cut>

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/1670.html

Entry tags:

ljidol

LJ Idol 11: Week 4: “My enemies are all too familiar. They're the ones who used to call me friend “

I Might Lose Some Friends Over This

Took a DNA test

Turns out I’m one hundred percent

a part of the proletariat

That bitch

That bitter humanist

Ride or die Globalist

With social anxiety disorder

I’ve always tried to keep it close to the chest

Telling my whole life story without giving away my personal biases

It’s like how I’m watching creepy AF documentaries on the big screen TV in the family room

Whenever no one else is home

Getting a little boozy and blaming daylight saving

(In this time-line it’s apparently singular)

Anyway, what else was I going to say?

Something about how in the end we all end up the same way

Our bodies will decay

And the atmosphere will reclaim the dust particles we only ever were

These vessels of infinite outcomes

The cosmic search

Final frontier

“We are all made of stars”

And still a faith in some greater influence that is constantly course correcting the status quo

Who has a table set for us on an inter-dimensional plane

So if we just shut up and obey in this existence

We get to live the real, less shitty one, in the hereafter

After, After, After, always after

But this is now

This is here

Here, here, hear me

Hear me now

Hear ye, hear ye…in the common interests of humanity “I’ll scream and I’ll shout

for the good things on earth that are on their way out

They say I’m a fool to oppose things like these

but I’m [just] going to continue to speak for the trees”

And I am not betting on being selected

to dine with the “father” in the heaven dimension

We’re at the peak of human evolution

And I stand in my body

Ready to say

We build walls and check the locks against the wolves of our own hearts

It’s like students ducking bullets

Or wondering how many poets have rhymed silence with violence

It’s a fear fueled fall from so much possibility

Never forget that shaking hands is to signify you are unarmed

It’s like watching a doggo sleeping as the clocks in his timeline race faster than mine

And try not to think too far ahead

I get it

But God isn’t dead, he never existed

All folklore is tradition

It’s like seeing the Earth from a commercial airplane

All the burning red orange embers of light pollution

And still you are thinking "every moment is a miracle"

But my belief system could never depend on some parent figure in the sky

Because I’ve been taking care of myself my whole forsaken life

Taken bad advice

The government still wants the money they loaned me to spend those 4 (and a half) years...

Invested in my future

Instead it was a time spent

Building a false perception of myself

for the new friends who had my back until they didn’t

I guess a bright green light somewhere went off above my ssn somewhere

After I was finally making a steady paycheck for more than a year

So much for upwards mobility

And yeah it’s funny

It’s so gosh darn funny

That I could stand here and complain

But don’t have the means to do a “god” damned thing

It’s like that feeling you get when you realized you’ve left your phone in another room

The simplest truth

If you cannot find it within you will never find it without

You can magnify, intensify experience

But there is nothing you can partake of that will bestow talent

It must be a practice

Focused intent

It’s like how I hate the act of brushing my teeth because it’s messy and my gums always bleed

Or that one big secret you know

In any given moment you remember you know it and think about what would happen if you told

not to be hurtful or betray a trust

but just-

To imagine the ripple of chaos that small bit of information would create

Irrevocable change

You think about it

for about a minute

And then you go back to forgetting you knew it

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/1526.html

LJ Idol 11: Week 3: Everything looks like a nail

A Free Verse Essay on Existential self-actualization
or

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

Tribalism is an inherent quality of the human condition, so the philosophers say

Us verses Them

The ends will always justify the means and all that

Love is the basest instinct of human nature and yet is feared

Compassion is the key

And daring to live life before the, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, ending

The further you go down the philosophy rabbit hole the more intensely you feel how little it all means

Hiding from our sense of self-awareness

I am I

But you are you

And every man is an island, and ashamed of their mammalian nature

The young witchy punk in me arguing with the skeptical bourgeois elder I’ve started to become

“But if you refuse to expand your practice you’ll only ever have a toy hammer that you insist on knocking on things just because you can…”

(The floor, the arm of the chair, oops not the cat, but gently on your knee…)

Synchronous ceremony

The ritual of lighting a flame in the darkness

Words whispered as beads are counted through fingers

Passing the good herb around a circle bathed in moonlight

Hearts and Hashtags

Change is the only constant
And I, for one, cling to existence

Curiouser and curiouser to see what this next generation brings us

To rise above irrational societal expectations

Feminism is old news now

Because gender is irrelevant

We’ve broken the binary code

My mind and my heart are an open pathway for communication

But my body is mine alone

And eventually the experience of pounding on every surface will be dulled by it’s repetitive nature

It’s a fools game in the Theatre of the Absurd

Can’t see the forest for the trees, so the mystics say

Divinity is just perception

And we can perceive ourselves free of the matrix

If only we believed in Humans

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/1238.html

Entry tags:

LJ Idol 11: Week 0: Resolution

200 Word Letter Poem To Myself

Dearest Self:

That feeling in your stomach

The aching hunger bordering on nausea

It’s trying to tell you that you are alive

Time is running out

The deadline on your life is undetermined
but it’s set in concrete nonetheless

Your inevitable headstone already exists

So when the pain in your back and the strain in your eyes make you want to curl up and cry

Remain resolute, have faith in the strength of your spirit

Start with intention and find your motivation

Not in the outcome but in the creation

Make an outline

A first draft

Have an epiphany

And delight in the mistakes that turn into wonders

Stop being afraid of your own imagination

leave it flowers and shiny things

and tell it it is welcome to dwell in your room and sleep under your bed

or in the swaying limbs of the tree outside your window

Give it a name and invite it to tea - or coffee as the case may be

But allow it to be beautifully twisted or saccharine depending on the day

Just remember that you have a voice
and say everything you’ve ever wanted to say

Because any day could be your deadline day

--------------------

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/784.html

LJ Idol 11: Week 0: Introduction

AN: I know I missed the deadline I just still wanted to post this up to let people know who I was.

A Rambling Gal Rambles On

Most of you would probably remember me as rswndrlst. Others might only remember me as Codenamewanderlust Some may have suspected I was also flyingsockpuppet. My friends and lovers have called me Sparrow. My grandmother calls me Rebecca.

I decided to start anew with a livejournal that more accurately captures my current state of being.

Somewhere between boiling water and steam vapor. Liminality.

It’s been six years since I sat down to write my first Idol intro entry. I still remember it like it was last Thursday. I was doing laundry in-between stringing words into sentences. I hadn’t yet turned 30. Saturn had returned to the place in the sky where it was when I was born. I was free! Freewheeling in San Francisco, flowers in my hair, walking for hours and hopping on the muni on a whim. Restless wanderer.

I live on the opposite side of the country now. Putting down roots in central Florida. The oddly shaped limb of my fractured family tree.

I sling corporate coffee and wear ugly comfortable shoes when I'm on the clock. I actually drink coffee now, not tea anymore, except iced tea (with lemonade).

I feel stuck, as they say. I’ve stalled out at the intersection and I’m just sitting on the hood refusing to stick out my thumb because maybe that’s not who I am anymore. I'm not really sure who I am or who I was ever meant to be but I am here. I am still here and who knows where I will be in another six years.

Idol always seems to start up again just as I need it, the writing practice, accountability, consistency. A reason to spill it all on to the page…

Crossposts: https://liminaltraveler.livejournal.com/660.html

Entry tags:

lj,
writing

LJ Idol Season 11 Signup Post

A declaration of intent

LJIdol / LPF: Week 13: "Enjoy every sandwich" (Home-Game)

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 12: Write Off

You fly, Butterfly

Soar now on the wind

Never give up, Buttercup

Because you know
You’ll always arrive in style

It's okay to sit still, sweet Daffodil

To take a moment of silence

Just don’t let the fears buzz in your ears

When your own inner power overwhelms you

Go back to the page
Maybe, stop hovering in doorways

Hoping the faeries will mistake you

(For one of their own)

Get high, Honey-bee

Take flight and let the currents guide you

Alight on the air with nary a care

Because you know exactly who you are

And if the most that can ever be said

Is that you sprouted wings and fled

Then let it be said!

Don’t let the stories they tell of you define you

Fly now, little Bird

And let not your worries deprive you

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 12: MacGuffin

I want to be a message in a bottle

Full of mystery

Sent out into the wilderness

The wild greens and blues

Riding the boundless current

For so long I forget what

it feels like to touch the earth

Until you would delight in finding me

Plucked from the gentle tide

An unexpected surprise

A welcome distraction

And a sense of connection

So fragile you would weep with joy

To read the salt stained words

Tucked inside clouded cerulean

Uncorked

Unraveled

Liberated

Purified

Given sanctuary

Taken to a place

where you feel happy

To be read

curled up in an armchair

Or at a breakfast table

between sips of coffee

Trying to find the meaning

The first and final macguffin

The pot of gold

at the end of the

Mobius-strip rainbow

To be spoken about with reverence

The line between philosophy and poetry
To be brought to life in your imagination

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 11: Long Distance Dedication

There’s a portal to Puerto Rico

by the back door

my Tío tells me

And I understand

If you stand just so

while it is raining

he says,

leaning against the open metal grate

The door-frame becomes the inbetween

Between here and there

I don’t tell him about the portal to Faerie
under the wash-line and how I keep loosing clothes pins

Instead,

I have been drifting

I tell him

and I know he understands

Even though he has been getting lost

somewhere between taking flight

and making plans

He knows I've dedicated my life

to pure adventure for a long time

I am someplace always

Inbetween

Time is currency

That I invest in experience

And I have little to spare

and too much to die for

Giving meaning to the passage of years

Those magical numbers:

2019, 2012, 1999…

The Autumn of 2011

seems like a lifetime ago
Tramping the streets of New Orleans

Decades now

of standing in open doorways

Of planting port-keys

among the memories

The accumulation of possessions

and possessions

As if by some means to anchor myself

to some moment in time and space

Flipping through the bookcase of memory

Like Matthew McConaughey

On the interstellar highway

The fluorescent thrum of the incarnate motorway

transports me beyond the boundaries of time

Without leaving my bed

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 10: Nadir

Singularity

She hadn't heard from User51 in weeks. Meta4 kept the burner phone with his last number in it. She had circulated their hashtags on all of the usual places. She’d agreed when he wanted go.

It was only a side quest, he'd said, an easter egg.

She had tried to find her own access point after he hadn't returned. Her only clue was "Apogee." She’d found it on a sticker in the 4th stall of the women’s restroom in the bus station in Someplace, Nevada.

It was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle while not knowing if you even had all the pieces.

Apogee was also the name on the highest score of the Addams Family pinball machine in Toledo, Nowhere. Above the name GoSting. That was the same night she’d smoked her last joint and solved Time Cube theory but couldn't quite remember it the next day. Stuck with this sense of deja-vu and feeling like a fixed point on a map between her feet and the sky. Above and Below. An exponent in a world of sleeping NPCs.

Do you still believe in it all? U had asked her once when they had retreated into the matrix, found a loophole in the code and stayed for almost a month in an unoccupied cabin in Thisplace, North Carolina. They’d read excerpts of all the books they were each carrying and left them all behind when they left.

U called it poetic terrorism. Like the weekend they stayed in a condo in St.Louis,Somewhere while the rich old couple who owned the place were out of the country. U hacked into the guys on-line gambling account and convinced her it was karma when she won big money on her first try. They only dumped half into their own pay-pal account before U wiped away the rest of their digital footprints.

I was in the honeymoon of my life… Meta hums to herself as she hangs string of lights over a fairly clean mattress she had found and pushed up against a wall in the empty 2nd floor office where she was currently squatting.

She’d also found an old sewing machine in a storage closet and it was on the floor next to an old microwave. The place still had power but no water. She reaches for one of the gallons she carried all the way from the gas station gasping as an automatic reflex makes her rear back, then she laughs at herself and the tiny light bulb of the old sewing machine, the familiar texture of something that could cause her pain. Like tall wiry boys in woolen caps with deep southern accents like caramel dripped on apples.

She’d broken character at least four times now. Picked up the blue handset of each old coin operated telephones she passed by and spoken into the silence: I’d like to speak to User51, please / User51 can you hear me?/ This is Meta4 calling for User51 / I would like to establish a connection / Please!

She dropped dimes and quarters that never came back. Pressed the lever that never caused a dial tone. And one time when she was quite sure she was alone she smashed the receiver against the brassy metal buttons of the numbered keypad repeatedly before hanging it back in it’s cradle, retrieving her pack from the ground and walking away.

___________________

A/N: This is the continuation of an entry I posted last season:

Intersubjectivity

I'm not sure if it stands alone but none of my other ideas for the topic this week came together. I enjoyed revisiting this world anyhow.

LJIdol / LPF: Week 8: Sprezzatura

She’s back of the bus crazy

Working through a bag of candy

The sights and sounds of the world

are nothing compared to the inside of her head

She’s

Tent city, under the bridge

Smoking reefer on street corners

Back of the bus crazy

Bumming two cigarettes simultaneously

With practiced precision

One over her left ear, one to her lips,

Tilting her head to accept the offered flame

She’s

living la vie boheme

If effort is graceless

She’s

a prima-ballerina

Swaying to that beat

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Lucid dreaming on LSD

Rings on every finger

Ash and ink stained fingertips

Painted purple fingernails

She’s

Motels and No-Tell’s

Midnight neon lights

Laying pull-can-tabs in the hollows of her hip bones

Keeping her secrets in the glass beads braided into her hair

Batting her lashes behind thick glasses

She’s
Back pocket sci-fi paperbacks

Using blades of grass as bookmarks

Effortlessly cool

As crazy as they come

Conjuring safety-pins

from the bottoms

of her pockets and draw string bags

Preaching the benefits of drinking

Hot water and turmeric

She’s
Making wishes on dandelion pods

Lavender sunrise chilly mornings

Drowning in saffron cardigan

Singing all the words

To songs you've never heard

Hearing the voice of god between verses

She’s

Philosophy at the bus stop

Sucking on gummy-bears and lolly-pops

Hot pink chalk graffiti

She was here…

She’s

Fundamentally free

And fulling her fiber art fantasies

Conversing with the cats

That congregate at her ankles

Wearing flowers in the buttonhole

Of her patchwork pea-coat

Trailing the scent of Patchouli

She’s
Psilocybin mellow, under the street-lamps

Reading the tarot in parking lots

Back of the bus crazy

LJIdol / LPF: Week 7: Steadfast

I want to write a utopia where for the sake of humanity

everyone put down their weapons

and saw through the myth

that there wasn't enough to go around

Because the Jesus I want to believe in didn't MAKE more loaves and fishes

it was the crowd

who only took what they needed to nourish them

You see greed has always been the problem

And capitalism is a hoax

And gee, 2018 has really become the year that I speak my truth

because even when I mean to give vague and polite answers

I find myself just giving away the actuality

This

is my reality

I’ve smoked to much weed to memorize these words

but I don’t think I’m telling you anything you haven’t already heard

Too smart for your own good, I'm told

Will we ever give up our willful ignorance?

BE the catalyst

For a change?

Because even, ‘How are you?’

Has become a rhetorical question

And you aren’t ready for MY rhetoric

I have an $80,000 degree in English literature

Deconstructionism is my default setting

Steadfast in my conviction

That green is a color that will fade

Until there is only red and then grey

Slate and dust

Scorched earth

But we are afraid of what we can’t comprehend

Science, hypothesis, causality and proof

Whatever happened to reduce, reuse, recycle?

Whatever happened to the movement to ban aerosol?

Why don’t more people compost?

I stand in an imagined sea of polystyrene and mountains of single use plastic bottles

A not so distant future

Will I even live long enough to see the destruction? I'm asked

and I am looking up the sidewalk at discarded burger wrappers and big gulp cups

I already have

And now here we are filling the oceans with our plastic

Cutting down the last trunkula trees

The earth is preparing to hit the reset button

The human race has only existed in a second of the Earth’s life

and we deserve to pay the price for our ingratitude

Help us Captain Planet you are our only hope…

A dollar bill is just a piece of paper with logos on it

A debit card is just another piece of plastic

Still, I would go full on hunger games in an arena to win a full payment of my defaulted student loans

Just for a chance to be a victor of the American dream

-------
exactly 400 words

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 5: Not My First Rodeo

On a sunny afternoon

A young witch is cleaning her cauldron

Thinking about unfinished projects

Notice: the sewing machine in it’s case

Notice: the shelf of books waiting to be read

Notice: the typewriter

She’s better than this, she thinks when she has a premonition

Herself; later that night trying to reach a deadline

Plundering her own journals for profound one liners

Sitting on the bed surrounded by so many pocket sized notebooks

Bindings worn thorn, filled with paragraphs of run on sentences

In multicolored ink

This is called procrastinating

She is told

As she cleans the cauldron

To avoid the pen

Doesn't chase the plot bunnies under the bed

Even though words are her addiction

She contemplates fabric and stitches, instead

The half made skirt wrapped up just so

in paper

in a box,

also under the bed

Needles trailing at the end of threads- seems unfinished

She knows she is only digger her soul deeper into karmic debt

by not giving proper action to anything she truly desired

Scraping ashes off cast iron

She sprinkles in a layer of black powder and sweet incense

Always starting over

Always a new beginning

She believes in impossible dreams

Secretly revels in happily ever afters

and loves rainy days

And coffee

And baking magic into cookies

And flying broomsticks

She takes too many pictures of the delightfully ephemeral sky

She collects new words,

like matchsticks waiting to be struck

But who am I kidding?

Because you already know that the SHE in this story is ME

And most of the time

*I*

have the bad habit of writing in first person

And you (yes you)

can hear this bird ~~singing~~ spitting rhymes

Sometimes
Even into a microphone

Up on a stage

But mostly

Only ever when she thinks no one is listening

Because
no one

Ever is

Ever really

Doing anything

Except living in their own story

~~Like most of you reading this~~

~~who have gathered to share this thing we call art~~

You know, how like

the not-so-young-anymore-actually witch in THIS story

got too comfortable living out of boxes
because she grew up mostly on the run

because her mama couldn't always pay the rent

Or how she became an avid reader

As a way to escape reality

Or how cleaning the cauldron becomes a metaphor

And how long it took to write

~~and then rewrite and then decide to share~~

this prose

Or even how I thought about you while writing this

And how I came a long way to be who I am today

But truly who of us hasn't?

~~Before you go think of your favorite color, if everyone who reads this thinks of their color, after awhile we will have manifested a rainbow~~

LJIdol / LPF: Week 5: Kayfabe

Staying in character

my best friend the covert narcissist

She couldn't read my mind

I knew this because she told me

I remember I was in tears when she had said this

sometime in the first weeks or months after we met

I remember sitting at her dining room table

after she’d practically rescued me from the streets

I remember she reminded me of my mother

I’d taken refuge on her couch when I had nowhere else to go

I worked for my meals as she taught me a trade she was already using against me

Animal behaviorist

She taught me how to study the body and read all the cues

To know how the creatures in my care were feeling

Said she even knew how to provoke a response

Wind up the monkey and watch it dance

Made me cry on my birthday (two years in row)

She was always the victim

But also

The judge, jury and executioner

I often circled the blocks instead of going straight home

Even after I got a job at a cafe on the other side of the city

Feeling myself banished from within my own home

Because I wouldn’t dare grow wings without her permission

I walked softly and carried charms with my own name etched in the surface

Held them in my pocket when I was interrogated over breakfast

By then I was a bird in a cage made of obligation and guilt and financial dependence

I came home one day to find the stairs were being painted by a local street artist

A mural had been commissioned as well, it appeared two days later:

A young girl stood on a plate

in what looked a lot like the favorite blanket I tended to drape around me

The girl seemed to be unaware of the large shadowy figures with forks and knives

I decided this must have to do with her internalized feelings

about body image and eating disorders than anything to do with me

As I walked on eggshells on my way to my own sanctum

That she’d mocked to the new housekeepers (that she insisted we both pay for)

My organized chaos of tchotchkes and kitsch

Old teacups full of loose change, lost buttons

Pin-backs traded daily off my jacket

They thought my kid must live there she told me

She’d reminded me of my mother

Whose abuse had already taught me how to be more than one person

How to take verbal punches to take the least amount of damage

I’d come to her cradling bits of my ego like legos that never quite fit together

An avid gamer

She was a master at tetris

Building a maze around my sanity

With no exit strategy

She was always the victim

But also

The judge, jury and executioner

Planting a seed only to watch it grow

plucking the fruit when I most expected it

Calling it the rotten, irrational

Holding it up to the light before telling me there was never any light

I am not what you think I am

Why would I lie?

Was it a lie, the one night I deflected her would be lecture

by pretending I was too high to understand

rather than admit I hadn't yet seen Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

She fancied being called a dragon

Or perhaps she was King Aurthur incarnate

Undoubtedly monarch of her own domain

And we all had our parts to play

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 4: Ghosting

We haven’t spoken in almost two years

There is so much I want to say

But I know you won’t hear it

We are ghosts caught in our own feedback loop of arrogance

Existing on separate planes
of the same home

Sometimes I am terrified that I have died

And this is my life flashing before my eyes

But YOU are the one haunting this house

A black cloud

Navigating through hallways in an effort to reduce emotional traffic
Avoiding responsibility

I’m feeling like I’m loosing time

Loosing the pages of this chapter

As my half present self remembers to keep my shoes off the furniture

For the sake of your mother

Who has taught me the meaning of unconditional love

Is it too much to ask for a little gratitude?

Could you shrug off your pride

Just this once?

Just this once could we make it about me?

Cause see

My DNA is linked to yours and I’m tired of paying your karmic debt

At least I’m working on my shit

Coming to realizations and shit

About the status quo

and status-es

And the place where I am counting days like dollar bills

Buying and spending time like currency

The rainbows that reflect in from crystals hung in the open windows that you could no longer see because you had boxed yourself in
Refused to let in the light

In the cottage house on the edge of the property built for you

By your mother with love and blessings

All of which you have taken for granted

The first time I left
You fed me lies, to bring me back

Planting seeds of false hope
All while demanding my 16 year old half-sister give you all of her very first paycheck because she was supposed to be “helping” you

Except being the father

kind of works the other way

Especially when your youngest daughter, my half-sister

was being raised by her late mother’s grandparent’s

And you are still being raised
by your still very present
saint of a mother

I wonder sometimes

About the blood in the water

When she dies

And weather I’ll stay and fight

Or fly away for good

Once her soul has departed

Because everyone else here

is giving everything they have in tithe

And then there is you

the “crown prince”

Once upon a time

You and MY mother were high school sweethearts

Who were history even before my third birthday

Your mother tells me I was conceived in love I have never felt

But this is MY story

And this is the sunshine I surround myself with

While your head is too big to fit in the goddamn house

Entry tags:

LJIdol / LPF: Week 3: Tsundoku

It had been a pattern for awhile.
As soon as I would make a space exactly right I would suddenly have to move

Take it all down

Start over in some other place with the barest essentials usually

For years this would happen to me over and over

I would find just the right way to arrange the furniture for efficiency of space and energetic flow

Perhaps it’s a nomadic tendency held over from being born poor and having a complicated family history

I got used to living out of boxes

But I couldn't help making any new new living situation my own in some way

I've become sentimentally attached to furniture and cried over thrift store clothing finds I had to leave behind

I have one small steamer style trunk that has followed me somehow

From home to home

Even after a brief stint “on the road”

My friends passed it from closet to basement until I landed on my feet

Books were the hardest to lose

Adopted from curbside free bins
or bought at witchy boutique shops or sidewalk sales

Mémoires and travelogues mostly skimmed

Underlined and highlighted

Out of print novels with enticing covers vying for attention

Coffee table photography books of the strangest homes money could build

And abandoned railway stations

I’d take as many as I could carry when the time inevitably came to choose

I buried my favorites in the bottom of the trunk; read and unread unlike

I’d get somewhere new and begin making it home

Stack books on the floor until I was gifted a night stand by a new roommate

Or that time I found a sturdy wooden desk spray painted silver and purple left for the trash collectors that I carried three grueling blocks all by myself because I didn't have a car

I have two shelves now

That came with the small non-permitted diy back porch room in my grandmother’s home in Florida for I have returned like a boomerang for a third time
This time I got myself a job as a bookstore barista and have acquired more books to add to the ambiance of the room

I took all the books out of the steamer trunk and lined them up by genre, and size

I’ve got a stack of unread library books next to my bed though

Somewhere along the way I gifted myself a kindle paper-white - I treasure it,as a literary gormandizer and minimalist lover of efficiency to me it is magic

but I still can’t turn down a good cover, or the musty scent of old pages

Maybe I will put up more shelves

One of the shelves I can barley reach because the room wasn't originally built for me
I hope to afford just the right folding step stool that could double as a seat to maximize the space

I have put up art on the walls

Made curtains

I recently bought a minty colored folding table to use my gram’s shiny black Singer sewing machine from the 40’s that still stitches like a beast as I sit on the edge of the bed

I call the room the Rainbow Oasis
I am afraid to get it set up exactly right