What keeps me away from you, this page, this tired wrist? She said ” I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been writing this whole time.” I speak to myself in unrealized poetry, the slang of the universe. How it becomes so elusive when I put it to paper. Am I now finally parenting myself, kissing the forehead of my inner child, telling him being different is a superpower? No need to speak to fill the immeasurable void with sound and language. I’ve never known another world other than that which surrenders to my wandering eyes, melting and hardening at the whims of the wind and dirt. I’ve grown, evolved through the random mutations of my ever-curious disposition. How I always wished to arrive, though now I realize I’ll always be in a state of arrival and departure, always mourning my past self and celebrating the him I’m stepping into. I’ve been centering myself all this time, only now realizing the self is an infinitely expanding universe with no center. I create to share. To share fleeting moments with the afternoon sun draping my skin with heat and sweat, the sound of a vacuum cleaner droning on from across the fence, “papa! papa!”, a reminder that childhood means awakening. To share what churns like celestial stew in my gut with my conscience mind, the outer crust formed by bubbling magma, never truly knowing the intensity of burning from within. To share with others sometimes too (I like to watch their eyes, the shape of their mouths). We all share this place, this floating ball of dirt. The anthill out front forming in cracks of pavement just as significant and wondrous as our great pyramids of Egypt. That’s what I mean when I say we share this place. That there’s no qualitative distinction between the bird’s nest resting in the home’s decaying soffit and the bustling city, a symbol of man’s urge to be close, to forget the night, it’s constellations, it’s own desire to guide us through this terrain. We’ve created a caste system, given things. names and values and places in the chaotic library of our thoughts. I have an insatiable urge to organize it all, to thumb through it’s pages, move the book from one shelf to another, then back again. I feel the need to fix all broken things (even though I know the world can only sustain itself through breaking and reforming on top rubble and debris). My happiest, my most at peace, is when I give up on making sense of the senseless. It’s scary to surrender that sense of control, but that’s all it is… a sense. And senses can grow and change over time like mangrove jungles reaching and twisting toward the sun around jagged rock and coral, building roots that don’t need to be grounded to be secure. Fear paints the interior of my house red and locks the door. It’s an old sense, just as important as love and togetherness, but we shun it away for how it challenges any sense of security and certainty we thought we had. But when a giant wave sinks a ship, do we blame the wind, the ocean, the ship itself? Maybe. But more importantly we mourn the losses and acknowledge the sheer power and mystery of the earth. So when fear capsizes us we shouldn’t punish the fear, nor should we punish ourselves for letting it in. We should respect its strength, its ancient purpose, and marvel at its passing. Fear will inevitably crash onto our shore again, onto the sand that is only the sand because it has known the waves so intimately, crumbling for eternity so that it can accept the wave like the child accepts the mother tucking him in at night, a gentle forehead kiss, a promise that everything will still be there when he awakes. So here I am, kissing my inner child, assuring him he won’t drown, giving him permission to dream.

to rely on my own whims. I tallied up the winners and losers in meat and vein, tugged lightly on each thread leading to the heart, and erected upright as a puppet would, accommodating all the ego’s demands. I don’t know what the body wants, or to say it more accurately, the mind doesn’t know. And what is a mind if not another self-interested muscle, hoping to out-flex the rest. We’re all Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mirror, trying to outgrow and and out-pace that small image of ourselves. I once jumped so high that I exited earth’s atmosphere and floated upward toward the vacuum of space. Directions like up and down became useless, the joystick of ego-mover lost its spring. And as all the masked saviors became limp and impotent, I realized that there were never any saviors to begin with. There were 12 rocks, an overly complicated tree-root system, a single blade of grass, 33 shovels of dirt, a lover’s remorse. You see, when we ignore the stuff of the world, and by that I mean all the touching and scraping, splashing etc., we’ve unintentionally crafted an impossibly selfish and fictitious compass, always pointing right back between our own two eyes. The stuff of the world was brought to us as a painting onto God’s canvas, yet we trample it like the tread on a malfunctioning treadmill, always expecting it to punt us off into betterness. Those of us who can untie ourselves from the game, the betting on winners and losers, the heavy marble slab that is our own mask pulling us down into the ego core of earth, can begin to see as seeing was intended. Not seeing as a form of looking but seeing as an offering, a witnessing. This thing some call love is actually vibrating and penetrating all the in-between spaces, and we can swim 100 miles in it’s ocean if only we’d allow ourselves to witness it. As sad and confused I may get, I’m a hopeful person, someone who at least wants to care. If you relax the muscles in your neck and let your head become weightless in my palms, I’ll hold and support you like the axis of the earth, letting it spin and dance and dream but never float away.

burrowing into the sand, coming up only to see the world as a fast and chaotic brushstroke. Or when I am Queen Leaf, a Saturday in October, caressing the wind as I defy gravity like an indignant child. I am the starfish kid too, spread out because I love all directions equally. Me and my 1,000 brains. I am a shopping cart with jammed wheels, I’ll go where you need me but not without a fight. I am just as I’m not. I’m fighting for relevance in an irrelevant world. Eat a hole through the screen door, let the rabbits out of their cages. Open all the windows and project your consciousness out of each and onto the clouds, heroically like the bat-signal. The world wants to know you’re here. I know it might not feel like it, but you exist and with that comes necessity. The world needs you! You fit snug into the crevices of those with you-shaped holes. Living is a mutual act. It has a way of nestling within itself like an infinite Russian doll. I am a nondescript weed in the garden bed, emerging to witness the lilies, their color and fragrance, the big plump cucumber flaunting its purpose, the stake in the dirt gracious enough to carry us both.

and not flailing around, as I sit here, not flailing. The ink in my pen not quite catching the paper. The sun, the only thing keeping me from complete despair. This place, sometimes a prison, other times a playground. I dream of movement and elasticity. No need to eat or sleep in dreams, the air gives sustenance. On the other side of the fence, father teaches son the ways of the lawn mower. He says “it’s all about the smell, when you smell that you know it’s working, but when it starts smoking you gotta stop.” I feel that in my heart chakra. I get sentimental about faulty power tools and patriarchy. I’ve got the garden beds and shovels, though sometimes the heart yearns for a noisy, spiny machine, the theatrics of it all! I’ve filled my vision with too much glowing rectangle, I had to uncuff myself from the slot machine. And I will say I do feel freer. Bored at times but lighter I guess. Everything has sooo many properties, qualities that were just overlooked. The squiggles of the universe on full display. A weed wacker sounds off behind me, or maybe a buzz saw I’m not sure. The shed door opens and closes indecisively. We build up and tear down, us lovely humans, we’re quite good at both. I myself, a picket of the fence.

the cool dirt sighs and blesses the morning. It is too early to draw a map of the day, and I’m grateful. The air is unburdened, uninterested in wrapping itself onto the stuff of the world. Do the birds dream at night of a morning so fresh and fragrant? Even the flies if seen through a microscope are smiling to themselves, as they love the furniture, the grass, the branch, the pavement all the same. I’m so full of whatever it is that life is full of, a vibrating mass, a weighted pawn. Drive by the animals, a safari of the soul, and take to the fingertips, all the tips pointing, grabbing, caressing. The caterpillar has engorged himself and I don’t blame him, the earth spoils if you wait for permission. The weeds were pulled weeks ago, left in a pile like dried candle wicks yearning for their waxy home. Scarves wrapped around tree trunks, bracelets adorn the tomato plants, a wristwatch in the rock garden. I built this place but I’ll never take credit. It was as much an accident as the wind sometimes yawns, forgetting that life depends on it being awake and alert. You see, each moment that passes is an infinity sentence, all that’s ever been, all that will ever be and will never be. The book is written on both the atomic and celestial plane. You can see the writing yourself if you relax the eyes enough, letting your field of vision dissolve into abstract forms. Can’t you see the writing now? The first language? It speaks too. If you let your ears float like half deflated balloons you will hear the rustling of the first tongue. And as you do this, can I ask you to think of me? Remember me as you would remember the invention of morning, the peeling open of eyelids, the birth, the mourning, the celebration.

would have never thought those were hammers in there. Dreaming of an ocean, the gentle pull toward the middle of nowhereness. Floating and crying ocean tears, filling the shapeless vessel, the nameless cove. We count the moments as they pass, kissing each as they become vacant memories. I love the sun when it heats me to my core, the seeds in my gut bursting with life, the stew simmering on the stovetop, the savior of fingertips. The delicate bounce and legato sigh, the orchid flowering in secret, the beauty hidden under the shed, the fear of success, of being seen, the life of shadows, of wounds healing victoriously, healing quietly, in secret, thick flesh, armor, lover, craver, savior, labor, rugged like lizard skin, always stretching upward toward the sky, believing in a God we can touch, a moon we can hold, one we can taste. And a smile is worth so much to me, it fills the crevices of my tired and calloused hearth. I’m swimming and waving my limbs in trepid joy, unsure of myself, about to burst with uncertainty since all pure things are continually discovering themselves, seeing themselves for the very first time, never sure what will be revealed around each corner. I’m the child inside my iris. I am grateful for this mystery. I live in a garden. I live with my tears. I am dissolving into the soil. The smiling sky. The swell of the ocean. A dream. The smell of rain. A belief.

Waking up with a lung full of breath, beaming with silent excitement. No bird song, just the low hum of an HVAC system. I am a mirror of the sun, a butter knife of the eye, and spoon of the heart. Left alone to my own devices I’m the device goblin, using them up before I can even call them my own. Who said freedom had anything to do with having nothing to do? Janis said freedom is another word for having nothing left to lose. I say freedom is a warm pillow. I have never dreamt of the mundane. My dreams always seem to place me in the subterranean underbelly of my cosmic pulse. Bubum… bubum… bubum… beauty forms in the silence between. I need a fresh start, a factory reset, a cleaning of the circuits, a kiss of the third eye. I tripped up along the way and now I’m self-replicating clones of worry and despair. My higher self sits by the river, always smiling and asking “what the fuck is he doing?” (he knows, but it always helps to vocalize the absurd). One day I’ll embrace the stillness, like the lower gut and its ladder to the heart. I paint the peripherals as to conceal the true color of our infinite expanse. I’m so tied to doing and being, as if life is this voluntary competition, half my effort going toward winning, the other half toward forgetting. I want lush rain forest shaman goddess energy in my gummy vitamins. I want a synchronized beating heart shared between all beings of earth and beyond. I want love not to have so many languages, just one, spoken through synchronicity and vibration. I want warm sand on my feet and the smell of salt. I’ve never left this place. I’ve always stuck with it, never truly gave it my all but haven’t given up either. We leave so much to the imagination as we shroud ourselves with ego tarps, protected from even the faintest hint of God’s breath. I want to open the day like opening one of those magical books in those magical movies, opening to a random page somewhere in the middle, orange glowing dust particles spiraling out from the binding and illuminating the dim space, entering directly into the chest. I want that to be my morning ritual. Even when I arrive, like I have now, to a place I’ve always hoped for, I don’t feel like I’ve arrived. I’m not able to catch my breath, set up camp, harvest the fruits of my own labor to make a cold and refreshing juice or perhaps a smoothie on this warm summer day. The inner engine was taught to chug along, not knowing what it means to be satisfied, to slow to a halt and take in its surroundings (those that typically show as blurred streaks in the periphery). No care for where its been or where it’s going as long as it’s moving forward. For a brief moment beside it (though now far behind) was a lone squirrel perched on the branch of a Spanish oak, holding in front of him like a trophy, a nut the size of his head, and all the joy in the universe had redirected onto his heart – the object he has manifested through countless dreams and waking hours now in his possession, a shining golden beacon of hope and foreverness.

Can I feel fulfilled immersing myself into silence and vacant clouds? Like a lone traveler on an empty freeway entering a dense fog, only to exit the other side onto an unchanged landscape. Time has weight and urgency only when we allow it to. We give it the power to stack like bricks onto our chest. We were meant to float and count the berries gathered, the wolves in the pack – but the days, hours, minutes, years, those are meant to float away like dumb insects. “When will you be ready?” is a question I ask myself constantly, as the hand of time drags me across rough pavement. The sky is overcast with a grayish blue hue, the wind wisps delicately against my bare torso, then more aggressively as I hear dry leaves scrape against paved earth, the birds are singing a sparse tune, a conversation I wish I was a part of, the sound of traffic droning on in the background creating a singular low hum I rarely notice, and I’m realizing it’s all the same song, no breaks, no flipping the record, changing the tape – we are both audience and performer. I can’t change who I am, how I feel the wind, how I am but a note in the grand symphony. Maybe “on-time” is just a way to fulfill the human desire to be on something. We are both eternal and transient, and can only really dance to the song of now.

Knowing myself, my ego and id are hiding in a junk drawer somewhere. I laugh and then it echos, bouncing off all walls and corridors until it’s laughing right back at me. “Scoot forward, lean back, deep breathe, sycamore tree,” I’m a fear goblin. See, when I was a child the door always opened to a thick and wild rain forest. I didn’t know to look anywhere else other than into myself. I was a fun-house of mirrors. I am still now only looking inward, but the chest that stores the soul is polluted. The gunk from the if’s and the maybe’s and the how’s stick like sludge on a cellar wall. I’m a bottle rocket whose lost its fuse. The conductor with a deep inhale, hands float up, but the downbeat never comes. Life feels prickly like a cactus sometimes and heavy like an unbreakable water balloon, those big ones that were always too expensive. I would like you to believe in me. Believe that I can hold something other than the weight of my own fear. I am a love artifact, buried in the pit of the stomach for ages, fossilized as a small heart-shaped teardrop stone. Fuck man, does it get easier or was it always this hard and I was just too distracted to realize? The earth fed me, leaving manna in front of the mouth before every step like a biblical Pac-Man. I want to squeeze every moment of existence, wring it out, juice it with pulp and all. But I also want to hide, to duck and cover, to not see myself, to unsee myself. It’s a delicate balance between everything and nothing, there is no demilitarized zone, just an imaginary border on an imaginary map in an all too real heart.

which turns into all the time but I’ve got cracks and splinters and holes that see through to the other side where everything is groovy. Grass is greener they say, it’s fine to say things to please a crowd unless it’s a crowd full of Nazis or career politicians. Leaving the comfy place to go to the scary place to get to another place where I’m the leader, the conductor of this strange orchestra, I say when to go, when to stay, when to repeat that line, and then we can all look and say, “isn’t that something that trees do?” Jean jacket menace with insignificant dreams (they’re all significant if you remember them), and cream colored cardigan waiting for a lucky lottery ticket, so one day the waiting is plated in gold and not rotting. Leave this place better than you found it, but how come that’s just not an option when everywhere you look there’s havoc? Everywhere the sky is screaming “you’ve violated my space, now you leave me with Industrial Revolution slime on my cute face!” Be kind to others. Forever people thought that being kind was some sort of grassroots campaign for poor folk who can’t afford being mean. Listen, don’t read this for sense, heck, the hand and the heart are in 2 different time zones and rarely get together for a drink or 10. When I’m happy, I’m happy, I can’t convince you that sometimes grass and pavement feel the same to me. Happiness is a funny song, it plays for some at the brink of catastrophe. Mine plays like ta lazy melody, searching for the next leading tone and then ahh… resolution. “Try being like him, try doing it like her, look at how the birds have no judgement,” isn’t that the ideal Jesus human strong boy? If we all can’t agree, that’s fine, just leave me out of the vote. I’ve got my own government of the soul. No winning, no losing, only celebrating. We mourn for lost time and lost money, and lost friends and family and land, and we grieve through every stage of dream, of night, day, and between, and that’s good! Who told you everything doesn’t deserve that sad song? I can’t seem to notice the difference between a stare full of purpose and longing, and one that wasn’t even directed at me. This is what I need, doing for the sake of doing. Like God. There was no purpose for light, but doing in itself is a form of magical realism. We can celebrate that! Don’t let the whispers of others sway you from finding the Big Bang God complex. There’s a room, in a big house, full of windows, full of light, drowning in light, no ceiling, no sky, forever creating itself, forever forging new hallways and passageways and doors. Dig yourself a sanctuary, cry and sing and dance and yell and tell me you love me, tell me I mean something, soothe my insecurities… secure in these… secure in trees… see cure in trees.