you say you can't give me a fairytale. well I don't think I want one.

i want to wake up with you. not like star-crossed lovers awakening beneath a silken canopy in the golden light of morning; like in that cramped twin bed when you put nutritional yeast on Cheez Whiz and painted my nails black.

i want to walk beside you not like a royal procession in the palace gardens, but like when we found coyote tracks and went stomping through the snow to see if they passed by the trail camera.

i want to build something out of tiny moments and pieces, like one of your collages; not grandiose and beautiful, built from nothing with a complex story, but made for the joy of the making, made out of whatever we happen to have, made to be enough.

i want to be with you without grandiose adjectives. I'm ready to do something simply for once.

we are beginning

restitution

your congregants, they’re breaking free your people, they abandon you into your mental cold you couldn’t hold them with your clever words you couldn’t make them feel the need

the philosophical decay of endless choruses the holiness depletes until you’re left with what you didn’t wanna say and I am stretching out, I am listening to everyone else

are you embarrassed? are you scared of me? do you remember what you used to be?

wisteria grows around your neck and bristlecone pine makes a nest for your decay and your exhaustion as you come to believe that you can be destroyed

you’re far too late to do anything about it I hope you know that you can’t do anything about it

are you embarrassed? are you scared of me? do you remember what you used to be?

silver-tongued preacher, oh you won’t pay the piper for long smooth-bodied criminal who never did anything wrong why don’t you tell me where your money comes from? why don’t you tell me where your heart really belongs?

I’m okay, we’re okay, it’s gonna be okay

I’ll piss everyone off by playing much too loudly

I’ll put on my brave face and tell you things you need to hear and I need to say

“it’s not your fault, I’ll be okay, I understand why you can’t keep on”

and I wouldn’t lie to you – why would I lie to you?

maybe my feet will leave the ground and I won’t have to stick around to see you with that smile every morning

maybe when we planned to go to Sellwood for the day I’ll go alone

maybe someday when I sit at home I’ll tell a story about how I once thought that I’d be enough for this one girl that I loved

I still love you, don’t you know that? I hope you know that I will settle down and I’ll regret I ever wrote these words

but for now a speeding train rolls past me and it’s all I think about, or I don’t think of it at all

so let’s be friends with each other, let’s get lunch together

I’m okay, we’re okay

this is typical

how do i say this without relying on those old clichés, tired time and time again by far wiser, far greater mouths than mine?

are these my words at all? maybe the stories are so deep within me that their words their phrases are all i have.

thus from drained lips i shall drop venerable words, oft-cited, oft-relied upon without shame; ‘tis a proud and storied tradition.

I could marry you someday.

I say, lying next to you after a night of caring and together

I’ve never loved anyone else like this.

and I believe it, fool that I am, miserable wondrous lover

You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

and it’s true, isn’t it. it’s true and that’s exhilarating.

i’m doing better.

it’s been a long time since i’ve burned words it’s been a long time since i screamed with horror at the feeling of my own incompetent skin

and this air in my throat remembers

but i am loved and loving now.

There was nothing. My limbs were a thousand pounds of lead the difference between which and a thousand pounds of feathers is that one might let you fly while the other is so useless, so uncommandable, all they’re good for is clubs flung at the nearest hard surface. My eyes wouldn’t focus, my lips wouldn’t move, and fragments of song played over and over in my head with no ending or product or instruction. It took endless held breath and slow arthritic twitching and iron tension just to move in a way that accomplished something.

What good is knowing that your thoughts are different from you when there are no thoughts, none at all, just endless music? What good is anything but listening to what your brain seems to be telling you is the solution and coming back bit by horrific twitching bit to attach to reality terrified in the back of your head that next time you won’t be able to come back at all? What good is knowing that it happens when you don’t know when or how or why you are seized by nothingness and frozen in yourself? What good are all the words when you can’t make them?

Lying against your breast,

sweat marking our area of contact,

my vigor spent but my energy

still filling my veins,

I am silver-tongued -

my words gilt with the clarity

of pleasure released.

I am home and your bard.

i love the city at night, the look and feel of it.

i love the feeling that i am alone 

and yet part of something massive and alive

ever shifting under my feet and in the darkness

that hides behind the streetlights

and in the small places.

every word is another desperate fingerhold. i write myself a rock face, an endless cliff to scale to reach your heights. i need you to help lift me up.

something to learn

When your mind tells you that you are unloved, that you are incapable, that you are lost, these are merely stories left from antiquity when danger lay behind every corner. and how strange and wonderful is your mind, that it can tell you these stories, that even after thousands of years of evolution it keeps warning you of the dangers ahead. you will not succeed where hundreds of years of safety and security have failed. you will not silence the old fearful storyteller. but you do not have to be these stories. they do not have to be a part of you. this is the power that you truly possess -  not to choose what to think, but to choose what to believe.

insp. by the hotelier - dendron

the musings of sleeplessness